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SOCIETIES 


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PREJUDICES 

FIRST  SERIES 


By  H.  L.  MENCKEN 

prejudices:  first  series 

a  book  of  prefaces 

in  defense  of  women 

a  book  of  burlesques 

the  philosophy  of  friedrich  nietzsche 

the  american  language 

New  edition  in  preparation  for  fall  of  1921  ] 
With  George  Jean  Nathan 

THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
HELIOGABALUS 


Out  of  Print 

VENTURES   INTO   VFRSE 

GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW:   HIS  PLAYS 

THE  ARTIST 

A  LITTLE  BOOK  IN  C  MAJOR 

A  BOOK  OF  CALUMNY 

MEN  VERSUS  THE   MAN 
[With  B.  B.  La  Monte] 

EUROPE  AFTER  8:15 

[With  Mr.  Nathan  and  W.  H.  Wright] 


PREJUDICES 

FIRST     SERIES 

By       H.       L.       MENCKEN 


PUBLISHED  AT  THE  BORZOI  ■  NEW  YORK  •  BY 

ALFRED-A-KNOPF 


COPYRIGHT,  1919,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  Inc. 

Published  September,  1919 

Second  Printing  January,  1920 

Third  Printing  April,  1920 

Fourth  Printing  March,  1921 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OF    AMERICA 


CONTENTS 

I  Criticism  of  Criticism  of  Criticism,  9 

II  The  Late  Mr.  Wells,  22 

III  Arnold  Bennett,  36 

IV  The  Dean,  52 

V    Professor  Veblen,  59 
VI    The  New  Poetry  Movement,  83 
VII    The  Heir  of  Mark  Twain,  97 
VIII    Hermann  Sudermann,  105 
IX    George  Ade,  113 

X    The  Butte  Bashkirtseff,  123 
XI    Six  Members  of  the  Institute,  129 

1.  The  Boudoir  Balzac,  129 

2.  A  Stranger  on  Parnassus,  134 

3.  A  Merchant  of  Mush,  138 

4.  The  Last  of  the  Victorians,  139 

5.  A  Bad  Novelist,  145 

6.  A  Broadway  Brandes,  148 
XII    The  Genealogy  of  Etiquette,  150 

XIII  The  American  Magazine,  171 

XIV  The  Ulster  Polonius,  181 
XV    An  Unheeded  Law-Giver,  191 

XVI    The  Blushful  Mystery,  195 


CONTENTS 

1.  Sex  Hygiene,  195 

2.  Art  and  Sex,  197 

3.  A  Loss  to  Romance,  199 

4.  Sex  on  the  Stage,  200 
XVII    George  Jean  Nathan,  208 

XVIII    Portrait  of  an  Immortal  Soul,  224 
XIX    Jack  London,  236 
XX    Among  the  Avatars,  240 
XXI    Three  American  Immortals,  246 

1.  Aristotolean  Obsequies,  246 

2.  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  247 

3.  Memorial  Service,  249 


PREJUDICES 
FIRST  SERIES 


PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

I.    CRITICISM    OF   CRITICISM 
OF   CRITICISM 

EVERY  now  and  then,  a  sense  of  the  futility  of 
their  daily  endeavors  falling  suddenly  upon 
them,  the  critics  of  Christendom  turn  to  a 
somewhat  sour  and  depressing  consideration  of  the 
nature  and  objects  of  their  own  craft.  That  is  to  say, 
they  turn  to  criticizing  criticism.  What  is  it  in  plain 
words?  What  is  its  aim,  exactly  stated  in  legal 
terms?  How  far  can  it  go?  What  good  can  it  do? 
What  is  its  normal  effect  upon  the  artist  and  the  work 
of  art? 

Such  a  spell  of  self -searching  has  been  in  progress 
for  several  years  past,  and  the  critics  of  various 
countries  have  contributed  theories  of  more  or  less 
lucidity  and  plausibility  to  the  discussion.  Their 
views  of  their  own  art,  it  appears,  are  quite  as  diver- 
gent as  their  views  of  the  arts  they  more  commonly 
deal  with.  One  group  argues,  partly  by  direct  state- 
ment and  partly  by  attacking  all  other  groups,  that 
the  one  defensible  purpose  of  the  critic  is  to  encour- 


10  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

age  the  virtuous  and  oppose  the  sinful — in  brief,  to 
police  the  fine  arts  and  so  hold  them  in  tune  with  the 
moral  order  of  the  world.  Another  group,  repudi- 
ating this  constabulary  function,  argues  hotly  that  the 
arts  have  nothing  to  do  with  morality  whatsoever — 
that  their  concern  is  solely  with  pure  beauty.  A 
third  group  holds  that  the  chief  aspect  of  a  work  of 
art,  particularly  in  the  field  of  literature,  is  its  aspect 
as  psychological  document — that  if  it  doesn't  help 
men  to  know  themselves  it  is  nothing.  A  fourth 
group  reduces  the  thing  to  an  exact  science,  and  sets 
up  standards  that  resemble  algebraic  formulae — this 
is  the  group  of  metrists,  of  contrapuntists  and  of  those 
who  gabble  of  light-waves.  And  so,  in  order,  follow 
groups  five,  six,  seven,  eight,  nine,  ten,  each  with  its 
theory  and  its  proofs. 

Against  the  whole  corps,  moral  and  aesthetic,  psy- 
chological and  algebraic,  stands  Major  J.  E.  Spingarn, 
U.  S.  A.  Major  Spingarn  lately  served  formal  no- 
tice upon  me  that  he  had  abandoned  the  life  of  the 
academic  grove  for  that  of  the  armed  array,  and  so 
I  give  him  his  military  title,  but  at  the  time  he  wrote 
his  "Creative  Criticism"  he  was  a  professor  in  Co- 
lumbia University,  and  I  still  find  myself  thinking  of 
him,  not  as  a  soldier  extraordinarily  literate,  but  as  a 
professor  in  rebellion.  For  his  notions,  whatever 
one  may  say  in  opposition  to  them,  are  at  least  mag- 
nificently unprofessorial — they  fly  violently   in   the 


CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  11 
face  of  the  principles  that  distinguish  the  largest  and 
most  influential  group  of  campus  critics.  As  wit- 
ness: "To  say  that  poetry  is  moral  or  immoral  is  as 
meaningless  as  to  say  that  an  equilateral  triangle  is 
moral  and  an  isosceles  triangle  immoral."  Or, 
worse:  "It  is  only  conceivable  in  a  world  in  which 
dinner-table  conversation  runs  after  this  fashion: 
'This  cauliflower  would  be  good  if  it  had  only  been 
prepared  in  accordance  with  international  law.' ' 
One  imagines,  on  hearing  such  atheism  flying  about, 
the  amazed  indignation  of  Prof.  Dr.  William  Lyon 
Phelps,  with  his  discovery  that  Joseph  Conrad 
preaches  "the  axiom  of  the  moral  law";  the  "Hey, 
what's  that!"  of  Prof.  Dr.  W.  C.  Brownell,  the  Am- 
herst Aristotle,  with  his  eloquent  plea  for  standards 
as  iron-clad  as  the  Westminster  Confession;  the  loud, 
patriotic  alarm  of  the  gifted  Prof.  Dr.  Stuart  P.  Sher- 
man, of  Iowa,  with  his  maxim  that  Puritanism  is  the 
official  philosophy  of  America,  and  that  all  who  dis- 
pute it  are  enemy  aliens  and  should  be  deported. 
Major  Spingarn,  in  truth,  here  performs  a  treason 
most  horrible  upon  the  reverend  order  he  once 
adorned,  and  having  achieved  it,  he  straightway  per- 
forms another  and  then  another.  That  is  to  say,  he 
tackles  all  the  antagonistic  groups  of  orthodox  critics 
seriatim,  and  knocks  them  about  unanimously — first 
the  aforesaid  agents  of  the  sweet  and  pious;  then  the 
advocates  of  unities,  meters,  all  rigid  formulae;  then 


12  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  experts  in  imaginary  psychology;  then  the  histor- 
ical comparers,  pigeonholers  and  makers  of  categor- 
ies; finally,  the  professors  of  pure  aesthetic.  One  and 
all,  they  take  their  places  upon  his  operating  table, 
and  one  and  all  they  are  stripped  and  anatomized. 
But  what  is  the  anarchistic  ex-professor's  own 
theory? — for  a  professor  must  have  a  theory,  as  a 
dog  must  have  fleas.  In  brief,  what  he  offers  is  a 
doctrine  borrowed  from  the  Italian,  Benedetto  Croce, 
and  by  Croce  filched  from  Goethe — a  doctrine  any- 
thing but  new  in  the  world,  even  in  Goethe's  time,  but 
nevertheless  long  buried  in  forgetfulness — to  wit,  the 
doctrine  that  it  is  the  critic's  first  and  only  duty,  as 
Carlyle  once  put  it,  to  find  out  "what  the  poet's  aim 
really  and  truly  was,  how  the  task  he  had  to  do  stood 
before  his  eye,  and  how  far,  with  such  materials  as 
were  afforded  him,  he  has  fulfilled  it."  For  poet, 
read  artist,  or,  if  literature  is  in  question,  substitute 
the  Germanic  word  Dichter — that  is,  the  artist  in 
words,  the  creator  of  beautiful  letters,  whether  in  verse 
or  in  prose.  Ibsen  always  called  himself  a  Digter, 
not  a  Dramatiker  or  Skuespiller.  So,  I  daresay,  did 
Shakespeare.  .  .  .  Well,  what  is  this  generalized  poet 
trying  to  do?  asks  Major  Spingarn,  and  how  has  he 
done  it?  That,  and  no  more,  is  the  critic's  quest.  The 
morality  of  the  work  does  not  concern  him.  It  is  not 
his  business  to  determine  whether  it  heeds  Aristotle 
or  flouts  Aristotle.     He  passes  no  judgment  on  its 


CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM     13 

rhyme  scheme,  its  length  and  breadth,  its  iambics,  its 
politics,  its  patriotism,  its  piety,  its  psychological  ex- 
actness, its  good  taste.  He  may  note  these  things, 
but  he  may  not  protest  about  them — he  may  not  com- 
plain if  the  thing  criticized  fails  to  fit  into  a  pigeon- 
hole. -  Every  sonnet,  every  drama,  every  novel  is 
sui  generis;  it  must  stand  on  its  own  bottom;  it  must 
be  judged  by  its  own  inherent  intentions.  "Poets," 
says  Major  Spingarn,  "do  not  really  write  epics,  pas- 
torals, lyrics,  however  much  they  may  be  deceived 
by  these  false  abstractions;  they  express  themselves, 
and  this  expression  is  their  only  form.  There  are 
not,  therefore,  only  three  or  ten  or  a  hundred  literary 
kinds;  there  are  as  many  kinds  as  there  are  indi- 
vidual poets."  Nor  is  there  any  valid  appeal  ad 
hominem.  The  character  and  background  of  the  poet 
are  beside  the  mark;  the  poem  itself  is  the  thing. 
Oscar  Wilde,  weak  and  swine-like,  yet  wrote  beautiful 
prose.  To  reject  that  prose  on  the  ground  that  Wilde 
had  filthy  habits  is  as  absurd  as  to  reject  "What  Is 
Man?"  on  the  ground  that  its  theology  is  beyond  the 
intelligence  of  the  editor  of  the  New  York  Times. 

This  Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe  theory,  of 
course,  throws  a  heavy  burden  upon  the  critic.  It 
presupposes  that  he  is  a  civilized  and  tolerant  man, 
hospitable  to  all  intelligible  ideas  and  capable  of 
reading  them  as  he  runs.  This  is  a  demand  that  at 
once  rules  out  nine-tenths  of  the  grown-up  sopho- 


14  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

mores  who  carry  on  the  business  of  criticism  in 
America.  Their  trouble  is  simply  that  they  lack 
the  intellectual  resilience  necessary  for  taking  in 
ideas,  and  particularly  new  ideas.  The  only  way 
they  can  ingest  one  is  by  transforming  it  into  the 
nearest  related  formula — usually  a  harsh  and  dev- 
astating operation.  This  fact  accounts  for  their 
chronic  inability  to  understand  all  that  is  most  per- 
sonal and  original  and  hence  most  forceful  and  sig- 
nificant in  the  emerging  literature  of  the  country. 
They  can  get  down  what  has  been  digested  and  re- 
digested,  and  so  brought  into  forms  that  they  know, 
and  carefully  labeled  by  predecessors  of  their  own 
sort — but  they  exhibit  alarm  immediately  they  come 
into  the  presence  of  the  extraordinary.  Here  we  have 
an  explanation  of  Brownell's  loud  appeal  for  a 
tightening  of  standards — i.e.,  a  larger  respect  for 
precedents,  patterns,  rubber-stamps — and  here  we 
have  an  explanation  of  Phelps's  inability  to  compre- 
hend the  colossal  phenomenon  of  Dreiser,  and  of 
Boynton's  childish  nonsense  about  realism,  and  of 
Sherman's  effort  to  apply  the  Espionage  Act  to  the 
arts,  and  of  More's  querulous  enmity  to  romanticism, 
and  of  all  the  fatuous  pigeon-holing  that  passes  for 
criticism  in  the  more  solemn  literary  periodicals. 

As  practiced  by  all  such  learned  and  diligent  but 
essentially  ignorant  and  unimaginative  men,  criticism 
is  little  more  than  a  branch  of  homiletics.    They  judge 


CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM     15 

a  work  of  art,  not  by  its  clarity  and  sincerity,  not  by 
the  force  and  charm  of  its  ideas,  not  by  the  technical 
virtuosity  of  the  artist,  not  by  his  originality  and 
artistic  courage,  but  simply  and  solely  by  his  ortho- 
doxy. If  he  is  what  is  called  a  "right  thinker,"  if  he 
devotes  himself  to  advocating  the  transient  platitudes 
in  a  sonorous  manner,  then  he  is  worthy  of  respect. 
But  if  he  lets  fall  the  slightest  hint  that  he  is  in  doubt 
about  any  of  them,  or,  worse  still,  that  he  is  indiffer- 
ent, then  he  is  a  scoundrel,  and  hence,  by  their  theory, 
a  bad  artist,  j  Such  pious  piffle  is  horribly  familiar 
among  us.  I  do  not  exaggerate  its  terms.  You  will 
find  it  running  through  the  critical  writings  of  prac- 
tically all  the  dull  fellows  who  combine  criticism  with 
tutoring;  in  the  words  of  many  of  them  it  is  stated  in 
the  plainest  way  and  defended  with  much  heat,  theo- 
logical and  pedagogical.  In  its  baldest  form  it  shows 
itself  in  the  doctrine  that  it  is  scandalous  for  an  artist 
— say  a  dramatist  or  a  novelist — to  depict  vice  as  at- 
tractive. The  fact  that  vice,  more  often  than  not, 
undoubtedly  is  attractive — else  why  should  it  ever 
gobble  any  of  us? — is  disposed  of  with  a  lofty  ges- 
ture. What  of  it?  say  these  birchmen.  The  artist  is 
not  a  reporter,  but  a  Great  Teacher.  It  is  not  his 
business  to  depict  the  world  as  it  is,  but  as  it  ought  to 
be. 

Against  this  notion  American  criticism  makes  but 
feeble  headway.     We  are,  in  fact,  a  nation  of  evan- 


16  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

gelists;  every  third  American  devotes  himself  to  im- 
proving and  lifting  up  his  fellow-citizens,  usually  by 
force;  the  messianic  delusion  is  our  national  disease. 
Thus  the  moral  Privatdozenten  have  the  crowd  on 
their  side,  and  it  is  difficult  to  shake  their  authority; 
even  the  vicious  are  still  in  favor  of  crying  vice  down. 
"Here  is  a  novel,"  says  the  artist.  "Why  didn't  you 
write  a  tract?"  roars  the  professor — and  down  the 
chute  go  novel  and  novelist.  "This  girl  is  pretty," 
says  the  painter.  "But  she  has  left  off  her  under- 
shirt," protests  the  head-master — and  off  goes  the  poor 
dauber's  head.  At  its  mildest,  this  balderdash  takes 
the  form  of  the  late  Hamilton  Wright  Mabie's  "White 
List  of  Books" ;  at  its  worst,  it  is  comstockery,  an  idi- 
otic and  abominable  thing.  Genuine  criticism  is  as 
impossible  to  such  inordinately  narrow  and  cocksure 
men  as  music  is  to  a  man  who  is  tone-deaf.  The 
critic,  to  interpret  his  artist,  even  to  understand  his 
artist,  must  be  able  to  get  into  the  mind  of  his  artist; 
he  must  feel  and  comprehend  the  vast  pressure  of  the 
creative  passion;  as  Major  Spingarn  says,  "aesthetic 
judgment  and  artistic  creation  are  instinct  with  the 
same  vital  life."  This  is  why  all  the  best  criticism 
of  the  world  has  been  written  by  men  who  have  had 
within  them,  not  only  the  reflective  and  analytical 
faculty  of  critics,  but  also  the  gusto  of  artists — 
Goethe,  Carlyle,  Lessing,  Schlegel,  Saint-Beuve,  and, 
to  drop  a  story  or  two,  Hazlitt,  Hermann  Bahr,  Georg 


CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM     17 

Brandes  and  James  Huneker.  Huneker,  tackling 
"Also  sprach  Zarathustra,"  revealed  its  content  in  il- 
luminating flashes.  But  tackled  by  Paul  Elmer 
More,  it  became  no  more  than  a  dull  student's  exer- 
cise, ill-naturedly  corrected.  .  .  . 

So  much  for  the  theory  of  Major  J.  E.  Spingarn, 
U.  S.  A.,  late  professor  of  modern  languages  and 
literatures  in  Columbia  University.  Obviously,  it  is 
a  far  sounder  and  more  stimulating  theory  than  any 
of  those  cherished  by  the  other  professors.  It  de- 
mands that  the  critic  be  a  man  of  intelligence,  of 
toleration,  of  wide  information,  of  genuine  hospitality 
to  ideas,  whereas  the  others  only  demand  that  he  have 
learning,  and  accept  anything  as  learning  that  has 
been  said  before.  But  once  he  has  stated  his  doc- 
trine, the  ingenious  ex-professor,  professor-like,  im- 
mediately begins  to  corrupt  it  by  claiming  too  much 
for  it.  Having  laid  and  hatched,  so  to  speak,  his 
somewhat  stale  but  still  highly  nourishing  egg,  he  be- 
gins to  argue  fatuously  that  the  resultant  flamingo  is 
the  whole  mustering  of  the  critical  Aves.  But  the 
fact  is,  of  course,  that  criticism,  as  humanly  practiced, 
must  needs  fall  a  good  deal  short  of  this  intuitive  re- 
creation of  beauty,  and  what  is  more,  it  must  go  a 
good  deal  further.  For  one  thing,  it  must  be  interpre- 
tation in  terms  that  are  not  only  exact  but  are  also  com- 
prehensible to  the  reader,  else  it  will  leave  the  orig- 
inal mystery  as  dark  as  before — and  once  interpre- 


18  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

tation  comes  in,  paraphrase  and  transliteration  come 
in.     What  is  recondite  must  be  made  plainer;  the 
transcendental,  to  some  extent  at  least,  must  be  done 
into  common  modes   of  thinking.     Well,   what   are 
morality,  trochaics,  hexameters,  movements,  historical 
principles,  psychological  maxims,  the  dramatic  uni- 
ties— what  are  all  these  save  common  modes  of  think- 
ing, short  cuts,  rubber  stamps,  words  of  one  syllable? 
Moreover,  beauty  as  we  know  it  in  this  world  is  by 
no  means  the  apparition  in  vacuo  that  Dr.  Spingarn 
seems  to  see.     It  has  its  social,  its  political,  even  its 
moral   implications.     The   finale    of   Beethoven's   C 
minor  symphony  is  not  only  colossal  as  music;  it  is 
also   colossal   as   revolt;    it   says   something   against 
something.     Yet  more,  the  springs  of  beauty  are  not 
within  itself  alone,   nor  even  in   genius   alone,  but 
often  in  things  without.     Brahms  wrote  his  Deutsches 
Requiem,  not  only  because  he  was  a  great  artist,  but 
also    because    he    was    a    good    German.     And    in 
Nietzsche  there   are  times   when   the   divine  afflatus 
takes  a  back  seat,  and  the  spirochaetae  have  the  floor. 
Major   Spingarn  himself   seems   to   harbor   some 
sense  of  this  limitation  on  his  doctrine.     He  gives 
warning  that  "the  poet's  intention  must  be  judged  at 
the  moment  of  the  creative  act" — which  opens  the 
door  enough  for  many  an  ancient  to  creep  in.     But 
limited  or  not,  he  at  least  clears  off  a  lot  of  moldy 
rubbish,  and  gets  further  toward  the  truth  than  any 


CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM     19 

of  his  former  colleagues.     They  waste   themselves 
upon  theories  that  only  conceal  the  poet's  achieve- 
ment the  more,  the  more  diligently  they  are  applied; 
he,  at  all  events,  grounds  himself  upon  the  sound  no- 
tion that  there  should  be  free  speech  in  art,  and  no 
protective  tariffs,  and  no  a  priori  assumptions,  and 
no  testing  of  ideas  by  mere  words.     The  safe  ground 
probably   lies   between   the   contestants,    but   nearer 
Spingarn.     The  critic  who  really  illuminates  starts 
off  much  as  he  starts  off,  but  with  a  due  regard  for 
the  prejudices  and  imbecilities  of  the  world.     I  think 
the  best  feasible  practice  is  to  be  found  in  certain 
chapters  of  Huneker,  a  critic  of  vastly  more  solid  in- 
fluence and  of  infinitely  more  value  to  the  arts  than 
all  the  prating  pedagogues   since   Rufus   Griswold. 
Here,  as  in  the  case  of  Poe,  a  sensitive  and  intelligent 
artist  recreates  the  work  of  other  artists,  but  there 
also  comes  to  the  ceremony  a  man  of  the  world,  and 
the  things  he  has  to  say  are  apposite  and  instructive 
too.     To  denounce  moralizing  out  of  hand  is  to  pro- 
nounce a  moral  judgment.     To  dispute  the  categories 
is  to  set  up  a  new  anti-categorical  category.     And  to 
admire  the  work  of  Shakespeare  is  to  be  interested  in 
his  handling  of  blank  verse,  his  social  aspirations, 
his  shot-gun  marriage  and  his  frequent  concessions 
to  the  bombastic  frenzy  of  his  actors,  and  to  have  some 
curiosity  about  Mr.  W.  H.     The   really   competent 
critic  must  be  an  empiricist.     He  must  conduct  his  ex- 


20  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

ploration  with  whatever  means  lie  within  the  bounds 
of  his  personal  limitation.  He  must  produce  his  ef- 
fects with  whatever  tools  will  work.  If  pills  fail, 
he  gets  out  his  saw.  If  the  saw  won't  cut,  he  seizes 
a  club.  .  .  . 

Perhaps,  after  all,  the  chief  burden  that  lies  upon 
Major  Spingarn's  theory  is  to  be  found  in  its  label. 
The  word  "creative"  is  a  bit  too  flamboyant;  it  says 
what  he  wants  to  say,  but  it  probably  says  a  good  deal 
more.  In  this  emergency,  I  propose  getting  rid  of 
the  misleading  label  by  pasting  another  over  it.  That 
is,  I  propose  the  substitution  of  "catalytic"  for  "crea- 
tive," despite  the  fact  that  "catalytic"  is  an  unfamiliar 
word,  and  suggests  the  dog-Latin  of  the  seminaries. 
I  borrow  it  from  chemistry,  and  its  meaning  is  really 
quite  simple.  A  catalyzer,  in  chemistry,  is  a  sub- 
stance that  helps  two  other  substances  to  react.  For 
example,  consider  the  case  of  ordinary  cane  sugar  and 
water.  Dissolve  the  sugar  in  the  water  and  nothing 
happens.  But  add  a  few  drops  of  acid  and  the  sugar 
changes  into  glucose  and  fructose.  Meanwhile,  the 
acid  itself  is  absolutely  unchanged.  All  it  does  is 
to  stir  up  the  reaction  between  the  water  and  the  sugar. 
The  process  is  called  catalysis.  The  acid  is  a  cata- 
lyzer. 

Well,  this  is  almost  exactly  the  function  of  a  genu- 
ine critic  of  the  arts.  It  is  his  business  to  provoke 
the  reaction  between  the  work  of  art  and  the  spectator. 


CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM  OF  CRITICISM     21 

The  spectator,  untutored,  stands  unmoved;  he  sees 
the  work  of  art,  but  it  fails  to  make  any  intelligible 
impression  on  him;  if  he  were  spontaneously  sensi- 
tive to  it,  there  would  be  no  need  for  criticism.  But 
now  comes  the  critic  with  his  catalysis.  He  makes 
the  work  of  art  live  for  the  spectator;  he  makes  the 
spectator  live  for  the  work  of  art.  Out  of  the  process 
comes  understanding,  appreciation,  intelligent  enjoy- 
ment— and  that  is  precisely  what  the  artist  tried  to 
produce. 


II.    THE    LATE    MR.    WELLS 

THE  man  as  artist,  I  fear,  is  extinct — not  by 
some  sudden  and  romantic  catastrophe,  like 
his  own  Richard  Remington,  but  after  a  proc- 
ess of  gradual  and  obscure  decay.  In  his  day  he  was 
easily  the  most  brilliant,  if  not  always  the  most  pro- 
found, of  contemporary  English  novelists.  There 
were  in  him  all  of  the  requisites  for  the  business  and 
most  of  them  very  abundantly.  He  had  a  lively  and 
charming  imagination,  he  wrote  with  the  utmost  flu- 
ency and  address,  he  had  humor  and  eloquence,  he 
had  a  sharp  eye  for  the  odd  and  intriguing  in  human 
character,  and,  most  of  all,  he  was  full  of  feeling  and 
could  transmit  it  to  the  reader.  That  high  day  of  his 
lasted,  say,  from  1908  to  1912.  It  began  with 
"Tono-Bungay"  and  ended  amid  the  last  scenes  of 
"Marriage,"  as  the  well-made  play  of  Scribe  gave  up 
the  ghost  in  the  last  act  of  "A  Doll's  House."  There, 
in  "Marriage,"  were  the  first  faint  signs  of  something 
wrong.  Invention  succumbed  to  theories  that  some- 
how failed  to  hang  together,  and  the  story,  after  vast 
heavings,  incontinently  went  to  pieces.  One  had  be- 
gun with  an  acute  and  highly  diverting  study  of  mo- 
nogamy in  modern  London;  one  found  one's  self,  to- 


THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  23 

ward  the  close,  gaping  over  an  unconvincing  fable  of 
marriage  in  the  Stone  Age.  Coming  directly  after 
so  vivid  a  personage  as  Remington,  Dr.  Richard  God- 
win TrafFord  simply  refused  to  go  down.  And  his 
Marjorie,  following  his  example,  stuck  in  the  gullet 
of  the  imagination.  One  ceased  to  believe  in  them 
when  they  set  out  for  Labrador,  and  after  that  it  was 
impossible  to  revive  interest  in  them.  The  more  they 
were  explained  and  vivisected  and  drenched  with 
theories,  the  more  unreal  they  became. 

Since  then  the  decline  of  Wells  has  been  as  steady 
as  his  rise  was  rapid.  Call  the  roll  of  his  books,  and 
you  will  discern  a  progressive  and  unmistakable  fall- 
ing off.  Into  "The  Passionate  Friends"  there  crept 
the  first  downright  dullness.  By  this  time  his  read- 
ers had  become  familiar  with  his  machinery  and  his 
materials — his  elbowing  suffragettes,  his  tea-swilling 
London  uplifters,  his  smattering  of  quasi-science,  his 
intellectualized  adulteries,  his  Thackerayan  asides, 
his  text-book  paragraphs,  his  journalistic  raciness — 
and  all  these  things  had  thus  begun  to  lose  the  blush 
of  their  first  charm.  To  help  them  out  he  heaved  in 
larger  and  larger  doses  of  theory — often  diverting 
enough,  and  sometimes  even  persuasive,  but  in  the 
long  run  a  poor  substitute  for  the  proper  ingredients 
of  character,  situation  and  human  passion.  Next 
came  "The  Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harman,"  an  attempt 
to  rewrite  "A  Doll's  House"  (with  a  fourth  act)  in 


24  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

terms  of  ante-bellum  1914.  The  result  was  500-odd 
pages  of  bosh,  a  flabby  and  tedious  piece  of  work, 
Wells  for  the  first  time  in  the  role  of  unmistakable 
bore.  And  then  "Bealby,"  with  its  Palais  Royal  jo- 
cosity, its  running  in  and  out  of  doors,  its  humor  of 
physical  collision,  its  reminiscences  of  "A  Trip  to 
Chinatown"  and  "Peck's  Bad  Boy."  And  then 
"Boon,"  a  heavy-witted  satire,  often  incomprehensi- 
ble, always  incommoded  by  its  disguise  as  a  novel. 
And  then  "The  Research  Magnificent":  a  poor  soup 
from  the  dry  bones  of  Nietzsche.  And  then  "Mr. 
Britling  Sees  It  Through"  .  .  . 

Here,  for  a  happy  moment,  there  seemed  to  be 
something  better— almost,  in  fact,  a  recrudescence  of 
the  Wells  of  1910.  But  that  seeming  was  only  seem- 
ing. What  confused  the  judgment  was  the  enormous 
popular  success  of  the  book.  Because  it  presented 
a  fifth-rate  Englishman  in  an  heroic  aspect,  because 
it  sentimentalized  the  whole  reaction  of  the  English 
proletariat  to  the  war,  it  offered  a  subtle  sort  of  flat- 
tery to  other  fifth-rate  Englishmen,  and,  per  corollary, 
to  Americans  of  corresponding  degree,  to  wit,  the  sec- 
ond. Thus  it  made  a  great  pother,  and  was  hymned 
as  a  masterpiece  in  such  gazettes  as  the  New  York 
Times,  as  Blasco  Ibafiez's  "The  Four  Horsemen  of 
the  Apocalypse"  was  destined  to  be  hymned  three 
years  later.  But  there  was  in  the  book,  in  point  of 
fact,  a  great  hollowness,  and  that  hollowness  presently 


THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  25 

begat  an  implosion  that  disposed  of  the  shell.  I  dare- 
say many  a  novel-reader  returns,  now  and  then,  to 
"Tono-Bungay,"  and  even  to  "Ann  Veronica."  But 
surely  only  a  reader  with  absolutely  nothing  else  to 
read  would  return  to  "Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through." 
There  followed — what?  "The  Soul  of  a  Bishop," 
perhaps  the  worst  novel  ever  written  by  a  serious  nov- 
elist since  novel-writing  began.  And  then — or  per- 
haps a  bit  before,  or  simultaneously — an  idiotic  re- 
ligious tract — a  tract  so  utterly  feeble  and  preposter- 
ous that  even  the  Scotchman,  William  Archer,  could 
not  stomach  it.  And  then,  to  make  an  end,  came 
"Joan  and  Peter" — and  the  collapse  of  Wells  was 
revealed  at  last  in  its  true  proportions. 

This  "Joan  and  Peter"  I  confess,  lingers  in  my 
memory  as  unpleasantly  as  a  summer  cold,  and  so, 
in  retrospect,  I  may  perhaps  exaggerate  its  intrinsic 
badness.  I  would  not  look  into  it  again  for  gold  and 
frankincense.  I  was  at  the  job  of  reading  it  for  days 
and  days,  endlessly  daunted  and  halted  by  its  labori- 
ous dullness,  its  flatulent  fatuity,  its  almost  fabulous 
inconsequentiality.  It  was,  and  is,  nearly  impossi- 
ble to  believe  that  the  Wells  of  "Tono-Bungay"  and 
"The  History  of  Mr.  Polly"  wrote  it,  or  that  he  was 
in  the  full  possession  of  his  faculties  when  he  allowed 
it  to  be  printed  under  his  name.  For  in  it  there  is 
the  fault  that  the  Wells  of  those  days,  almost  beyond 
any  other  fictioneer  of  the  time,  was  incapable  of — 


26  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  fault  of  dismalness,  of  tediousness — the  witless 
and  contagious  coma  of  the  evangelist.  Here,  for 
nearly  six  hundred  pages  of  fine  type,  he  rolls  on 
in  an  intellectual  cloud,  boring  one  abominably  with 
uninteresting  people,  pointless  situations,  revelations 
that  reveal  nothing,  arguments  that  have  no  apposite- 
ness,  expositions  that  expose  naught  save  an  insatiable 
and  torturing  garrulity.  Where  is  the  old  fine  ad- 
dress of  the  man?  Where  is  his  sharp  eye  for  the 
salient  and  significant  in  character?  Where  is  his 
instinct  for  form,  his  skill  at  putting  a  story  together, 
his  hand  for  making  it  unwind  itself?  These  things 
are  so  far  gone  that  it  becomes  hard  to  believe  that 
they  ever  existed.  There  is  not  the  slightest  sign  of 
them  in  "Joan  and  Peter."  The  book  is  a  botch  from 
end  to  end,  and  in  that  botch  there  is  not  even  the 
palliation  of  an  arduous  enterprise  gallantly  at- 
tempted. No  inherent  difficulty  is  visible.  The 
story  is  anything  but  complex,  and  surely  anything  but 
subtle.  Its  badness  lies  wholly  in  the  fact  that  the 
author  made  a  mess  of  the  writing,  that  his  quondam 
cunning,  once  so  exhilarating,  was  gone  when  he  be- 
gan it. 

Reviewing  it  at  the  time  of  its  publication,  I  in- 
clined momentarily  to  the  notion  that  the  war  was  to 
blame.  No  one  could  overestimate  the  cost  of  that 
struggle  to  the  English,  not  only  in  men  and  money, 
but  also  and  more  importantly  in  the  things  of  the 


THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  27 

spirit.  It  developed  national  traits  that  were  greatly 
at  odds  with  the  old  ideal  of  Anglo-Saxon  character 
— an  extravagant  hysteria,  a  tendency  to  whimper 
under  blows,  political  radicalism  and  credulity.  It 
overthrew  the  old  ruling  caste  of  the  land  and  gave 
over  the  control  of  things  to  upstarts  from  the  lowest 
classes — shady  Jews,  snuffling  Methodists,  prehensile 
commercial  gents,  disgusting  demagogues,  all  sorts 
of  self-seeking  adventurers.  Worst  of  all,  the  strain 
seemed  to  work  havoc  with  the  customary  dignity  and 
reticence,  and  even  with  the  plain  commonsense  of 
many  Englishmen  on  a  higher  level,  and  in  particu- 
lar many  English  writers.  The  astounding  bawling 
of  Kipling  and  the  no  less  astounding  bombast  of  G. 
K.  Chesterton  were  anything  but  isolated;  there  were, 
in  fact,  scores  of  other  eminent  authors  in  the  same 
state  of  eruption,  and  a  study  of  the  resultant  litera- 
ture of  objurgation  will  make  a  fascinating  job  for 
some  sweating  Privatdozent  of  to-morrow,  say  out  of 
Gottingen  or  Jena.  It  occurred  to  me,  as  I  say,  that 
Wells  might  have  become  afflicted  by  this  same  de- 
moralization, but  reflection  disposed  of  the  notion. 
On  the  one  hand,  there  was  the  plain  fact  that  his  ac- 
tual writings  on  the  war,  while  marked  by  the  bitter- 
ness of  the  time,  were  anything  but  insane,  and  on 
the  other  hand  there  was  the  equally  plain  fact  that  his 
decay  had  been  in  progress  a  long  while  before  the 
Germans  made  their  fateful  thrust  at  Liege. 


28  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

The  precise  thing  that  ailed  him  I  found  at  last 
on  page  272  et  seq.  of  the  American  edition  of  his 
book.  There  it  was  plainly  described,  albeit  unwit- 
tingly, but  if  you  will  go  back  to  the  other  novels  since 
"Marriage"  you  will  find  traces  of  it  in  all  of  them, 
and  even  more  vivid  indications  in  the  books  of  ex- 
position and  philosophizing  that  have  accompanied 
them.  What  has  slowly  crippled  him  and  perhaps 
disposed  of  him  is  his  gradual  acceptance  of  the 
theory,  corrupting  to  the  artist  and  scarcely  less  so  to 
the  man,  that  he  is  one  of  the  Great  Thinkers  of  his 
era,  charged  with  a  pregnant  Message  to  the  Younger 
Generation — that  his  ideas,  rammed  into  enough 
skulls,  will  Save  the  Empire,  not  only  from  the  satanic 
Nietzscheism  of  the  Hindenburgs  and  post-Hinden- 
burgs,  but  also  from  all  those  inner  Weaknesses  that 
taint  and  flabbergast  its  vitals,  as  the  tapeworm  with 
nineteen  heads  devoured  Atharippus  of  Macedon. 
In  brief,  he  suffers  from  a  messianic  delusion — and 
once  a  man  begins  to  suffer  from  a  messianic  delusion 
his  days  as  a  serious  artist  are  ended.  He  may  yet 
serve  the  state  with  laudable  devotion;  he  may  yet 
enchant  his  millions;  he  may  yet  posture  and  gyrate 
before  the  world  as  a  man  of  mark.  But  not  in  the 
character  of  artist.  Not  as  a  creator  of  sound  books. 
Not  in  the  separate  place  of  one  who  observes  the 
eternal  tragedy  of  man  with  full  sympathy  and  un- 
derstanding, and  yet  with  a  touch  of  god-like  remote- 


?fr°/0£  ' 


6  | 

THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  29 

ness.     Not  as  Homer  saw  it,  smiting  the  while  his 
blooming  lyre. 

I  point,  as  I  say,  to  page  272  of  "Joan  and  Peter," 
whereon,  imperfectly  concealed  by  jocosity,  you  will 
find  Wells'  private  view  of  Wells — a  view  at  once 
too  flattering  and  libelous.  What  it  shows  is  the  ab- 
sorption of  the  artist  in  the  tin-pot  reformer  and  pro- 
fessional wise  man.  A  descent,  indeed!  The  man 
impinged  upon  us  and  made  his  first  solid  success, 
not  as  a  merchant  of  banal  pedagogics,  not  as  a 
hawker  of  sociological  liver-pills,  but  as  a  master  of 
brilliant  and  life-like  representation,  an  evoker  of 
unaccustomed  but  none  the  less  deep-seated  emotions, 
a  dramatist  of  fine  imagination  and  highly  resource- 
ful execution.  It  was  the  stupendous  drama  and  spec- 
tacle of  modern  life,  and  not  its  dubious  and  unin- 
telligible lessons,  that  drew  him  from  his  test-tubes 
and  guinea-pigs  and  made  an  artist  of  him,  and  to 
the  business  of  that  artist,  once  he  had  served  his 
apprenticeship,  he  brought  a  vision  so  keen,  a  point 
of  view  so  fresh  and  sane  and  a  talent  for  exhibition 
so  lively  and  original  that  he  straightway  conquered 
all  of  us.  Nothing  could  exceed  the  sheer  radiance 
of  "Tono-Bungay."  It  is  a  work  that  glows  with 
reality.  It  projects  a  whole  epoch  with  unforgettable 
effect.  It  is  a  moving-picture  conceived  and  ar- 
ranged, not  by  the  usual  ex-bartender  or  chorus  man, 
but  by  an  extremely  civilized  and  sophisticated  ob- 


30  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

server,  alert  to  every  detail  of  the  surface  and  yet 
acutely  aware  of  the  internal  play  of  forces,  the  es- 
sential springs,  the  larger,  deeper  lines  of  it.  In 
brief,  it  is  a  work  of  art  of  the  soundest  merit,  for  it 
both  represents  accurately  and  interprets  convincingly, 
and  under  everything  is  a  current  of  feeling  that  co- 
ordinates and  informs  the  whole. 

But  in  the  success  of  the  book  and  of  the  two  or 
three  following  it  there  was  a  temptation,  and  in  the 
temptation  a  peril.  The  audience  was  there,  high 
in  expectation,  eagerly  demanding  more.  And  in  the 
ego  of  the  man — a  true  proletarian,  and  hence  born 
with  morals,  faiths,  certainties,  vasty  gaseous  hopes 
— there  was  an  urge.  That  urge,  it  seems  to  me,  be- 
gan to  torture  him  when  he  set  about  "The  Passion- 
ate Friends."  In  the  presence  of  it,  he  was  dissuaded 
from  the  business  of  an  artist, — made  discontented 
with  the  business  of  an  artist.  It  was  not  enough  to 
display  the  life  of  his  time  with  accuracy  and  under- 
standing; it  was  not  even  enough  to  criticize  it  with 
a  penetrating  humor  and  sagacity.  From  the  depths 
of  his  being,  like  some  foul  miasma,  there  arose  the 
old,  fatuous  yearning  to  change  it,  to  improve  it,  to 
set  it  right  where  it  was  wrong,  to  make  it  over  accord- 
ing to  some  pattern  superior  to  the  one  followed  by 
the  Lord  God  Jehovah.  With  this  sinister  impulse, 
as  aberrant  in  an  artist  as  a  taste  for  legs  in  an  arch- 
bishop, the  instinct  that  had  created  "Tono-Bungay" 


THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  31 

and  "The  New  Machiavelli"  gave  battle,  and  for  a 
while  the  issue  was  in  doubt.  But  with  "Marriage," 
its  trend  began  to  be  apparent — and  before  long  the 
evangelist  was  triumphant,  and  his  bray  battered  the 
ear,  and  in  the  end  there  was  a  quite  different  Wells 
before  us,  and  a  Wells  worth  infinitely  less  than  the 
one  driven  off.  To-day  one  must  put  him  where  he 
has  begun  to  put  himself — not  among  the  literary 
artists  of  English,  but  among  the  brummagem  proph- 
ets of  England.  His  old  rival  was  Arnold  Ben- 
nett. His  new  rival  is  the  Fabian  Society,  or  maybe 
Lord  Northcliffe,  or  the  surviving  Chesterton,  or  the 
later  Hillaire  Belloc. 

The  prophesying  business  is  like  writing  fugues; 
it  is  fatal  to  every  one  save  the  man  of  absolute  genius. 
The  lesser  fellow — and  Wells,  for  all  his  cleverness, 
is  surely  one  of  the  lesser  fellows — is  bound  to  come 
to  grief  at  it,  and  one  of  the  first  signs  of  his  coming 
to  grief  is  the  drying  up  of  his  sense  of  humor.  Com- 
pare "The  Soul  of  a  Bishop"  or  "Joan  and  Peter"  to 
"Ann  Veronica"  or  "The  History  of  Mr.  Polly." 
One  notices  instantly  the  disappearance  of  the  comic 
spirit,  the  old  searching  irony — in  brief,  of  the  pre- 
cise thing  that  keeps  the  breath  of  life  in  Arnold 
Bennett.  It  was  in  "Boon,"  I,  believe,  that  this  irony 
showed  its  last  flare.  There  is  a  passage  in  that  book 
which  somehow  lingers  in  the  memory:  a  portrait  of 
the  United  States  as  it  arose  in  the  mind  of  an  Eng- 


32  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

lishman  reading  the  Nation  of  yesteryear:  "a  vain, 
garrulous  and  prosperous  female  of  uncertain  age, 
and  still  more  uncertain  temper,  with  unfounded  pre- 
tensions to  intellectuality  and  an  idea  of  refinement 
of  the  most  negative  description  .  .  .  the  Aunt  Er- 
rant of  Christendom."  A  capital  whimsy — but 
blooming  almost  alone.  A  sense  of  humor,  had  it 
been  able  to  survive  the  theology,  would  certainly  have 
saved  us  from  Lady  Sunderbund,  in  "The  Soul  of  a 
Bishop,"  and  from  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  in 
"Joan  and  Peter."  But  it  did  not  and  could  not  sur- 
vive. It  always  withers  in  the  presence  of  the  mes- 
sianic delusion,  like  justice  and  the  truth  in  front  of 
patriotic  passion.  What  takes  its  place  is  the  oafish, 
witless  buffoonishness  of  the  chautauquas  and  the  floor 
of  Congress — for  example,  the  sort  of  thing  that 
makes  an  intolerable  bore  of  "Bealby." 

Nor  are  Wells'  ideas,  as  he  has  so  laboriously  ex- 
pounded them,  worth  the  sacrifice  of  his  old  lively 
charm.  They  are,  in  fact,  second-hand,  and  he  often 
muddles  them  in  the  telling.  In  "First  and  Last 
Things"  he  preaches  a  flabby  Socialism,  and  then, 
toward  the  end,  admits  frankly  that  it  doesn't  work. 
In  "Boon"  he  erects  a  whole  book  upon  an  eighth- 
rate  platitude,  to  wit,  the  platitude  that  English  litera- 
ture, in  these  latter  times,  is  platitudinous — a  three- 
cornered  banality,  indeed,  for  his  own  argument  is 
a  case  in  point,  and  so  helps  to  prove  what  was  al- 


THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  33 

ready  obvious.  In  "The  Research  Magnificent"  he 
smouches  an  idea  from  Nietzsche,  and  then  mauls  it  so 
badly  that  one  begins  to  wonder  whether  he  is  in 
favor  of  it  or  against  it.  In  "The  Undying  Fire" 
he  first  states  the  obvious,  and  then  flees  from  it  in 
alarm.  In  his  war  books  he  borrows  right  and 
left — from  Dr.  Wilson,  from  the  British  Socialists, 
from  Romain  Rolland,  even  from  such  profound 
thinkers  as  James  M.  Beck,  Lloyd-George  and  the 
editor  of  the  New  York  Tribune — and  everything 
that  he  borrows  is  flat.  In  "Joan  and  Peter"  he  first 
argues  that  England  is  going  to  pot  because  Eng- 
lish education  is  too  formal  and  archaic,  and  then 
that  Germany  is  going  to  pot  because  German  edu- 
cation is  too  realistic  and  opportunist.  He  seems  to 
respond  to  all  the  varying  crazes  and  fallacies  of  the 
day;  he  swallows  them  without  digesting  them;  he 
tries  to  substitute  mere  timeliness  for  reflection  and 
feeling.  And  under  all  the  rumble-bumble  of  bad 
ideas  is  the  imbecile  assumption  of  the  jitney  messiah 
at  all  times  and  everywhere:  that  human  beings  may 
be  made  over  by  changing  the  rules  under  which  they 
live,  that  progress  is  a  matter  of  intent  and  foresight, 
that  an  act  of  Parliament  can  cure  the  blunders  and 
check  the  practical  joking  of  God. 

Such  notions  are  surely  no  baggage  for  a  serious 
novelist.  A  novelist,  of  course,  must  have  a  point 
of  view,  but  it  must  be  a  point  of  view  untroubled  by 


34  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  crazes  of  the  moment,  it  must  regard  the  internal 
workings  and  meanings  of  existence  and  not  merely 
its  superficial  appearances.  A  novelist  must  view  life 
from  some  secure  rock,  drawing  it  into  a  definite  per- 
spective, interpreting  it  upon  an  ordered  plan.  Even 
if  he  hold  (as  Conrad  does,  and  Dreiser,  and  Hardy, 
and  Anatole  France)  that  it  is  essentially  meaning- 
less, he  must  at  least  display  that  meaninglessness 
with  reasonable  clarity  and  consistency.  Wells  shows 
no  such  solid  and  intelligible  attitude.  He  is  too 
facile,  too  enthusiastic,  too  eager  to  teach  to-day  what 
he  learned  yesterday.  Van  Wyck  Brooks  once  tried 
to  reduce  the  whole  body  of  his  doctrine  to  a  succinct 
statement.  The  result  was  a  little  volume  a  great 
deal  more  plausible  than  any  that  Wells  himself  has 
ever  written — but  also  one  that  probably  surprised 
him  now  and  then  as  he  read  it.  In  it  all  his  contra- 
dictions were  reconciled,  all  his  gaps  bridged,  all  his 
shifts  ameliorated.  Brooks  did  for  him,  in  brief, 
what  William  Bayard  Hale  did  for  Dr.  Wilson  in 
"The  New  Freedom,"  and  has  lived  to  regret  it,  I 
daresay,  or  at  all  events  the  vain  labor  of  it,  in  the 
same  manner.  .   .  . 

What  remains  of  Wells?  There  remains  a  little 
shelf  of  very  excellent  books,  beginning  with  "Tono- 
Bungay"  and  ending  with  "Marriage."  It  is  a  shelf 
flanked  on  the  one  side  by  a  long  row  of  extravagant 
romances  in  the  manner  of  Jules  Verne,  and  on  the 


THE  LATE  MR.  WELLS  35 

other  side  by  an  even  longer  row  of  puerile  tracts. 
But  let  us  not  underestimate  it  because  it  is  in  such 
uninviting  company.  There  is  on  it  some  of  the  live- 
liest, most  original,  most  amusing,  and  withal  most 
respectable  fiction  that  England  has  produced  in  our 
time.  In  that  fiction  there  is  a  sufficient  memorial  to 
a  man  who,  between  two  debauches  of  claptrap,  had 
his  day  as  an  artist. 


III.    ARNOLD    BENNETT 

OF  Bennett  it  is  quite  easy  to  conjure  up  a 
recognizable  picture  by  imaging  everything 
that  Wells  is  not — that  is,  everything  in- 
terior, everything  having  to  do  with  attitudes  and 
ideas,  everything  beyond  the  mere  craft  of  arranging 
words  in  ingratiating  sequences.  As  stylists,  of 
course,  they  have  many  points  of  contact.  Each  writes 
a  journalese  that  is  extraordinarily  fluent  and  tuneful; 
each  is  apt  to  be  carried  away  by  the  rush  of  his  own 
smartness.  But  in  their  matter  they  stand  at  opposite 
poles.  Wells  has  a  believing  mind,  and  cannot  resist 
the  lascivious  beckonings  and  eye-winkings  of  mere- 
tricious novelty;  Bennett  carries  skepticism  so  far  that 

y  it  often  takes  on  the  appearance  of  a  mere  peasant-like 
suspicion  of  ideas,  bellicose  and  unintelligent.  Wells 
is  astonishingly  intimate  and  confidential;  and  more 
than  one  of  his  novels  reeks  with  a  shameless  sort  of 
autobiography;  Bennett,  even  when  he  makes  use  of 
personal  experience,  contrives  to  get  impersonality 
into  it.  Wells,  finally,  is  a  sentimentalist,  and  cannot 
conceal  his  feelings;  Bennett,  of  all  the  English  novel- 

,   ists  of  the  day,  is  the  most  steadily  aloof  and  ironical. 

36 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  37 

This  habit  of  irony,  in  truth,  is  the  thing  that  gives 
Bennett  all  his  characteristic  color,  and  is  at  the  bot- 
tom of  both  his  peculiar  merit  and  his  peculiar  limita- 
tion. On  the  one  hand  it  sets  him  free  from  the  beset- 
ting sin  of  the  contemporary  novelist:  he  never 
preaches,  he  has  no  messianic  delusion,  he  is  above  the 
puerile  theories  that  have  engulfed  such  romantic  men 
as  Wells,  Winston  Churchill  and  the  late  Jack  Lon- 
don, and  even,  at  times,  such  sentimental  agnostics  as 
Dreiser.  But  on  the  other  hand  it  leaves  him  empty 
of  the  passion  that  is,  when  all  is  said  and  done,  the 
chief  mark  of  the  true  novelist.  The  trouble  with 
him  is  that  he  cannot  feel  with  his  characters,  that 
he  never  involves  himself  emotionally  in  their  strug- 
gles against  destiny,  that  the  drama  of  their  lives 
never  thrills  or  dismays  him — and  the  result  is  that 
he  is  unable  to  arouse  in  the  reader  that  penetrating 
sense  of  kinship,  that  profound  and  instinctive  sym- 
pathy, which  in  its  net  effect  is  almost  indistinguish- 
able from  the  understanding  born  of  experiences  ac- 
tually endured  and  emotions  actually  shared.  Joseph 
Conrad,  in  a  memorable  piece  of  criticism,  once  put 
the  thing  clearly.  "My  task,"  he  said,  "is,  by  the 
power  of  the  written  word,  to  make  you  hear,  to  make 
you  feel  —  it  is,  above  all,  to  make  you  see."  Here 
seeing,  it  must  be  obvious,  is  no  more  than  feeling 
put  into  physical  terms;  it  is  not  the  outward  aspect 
that  is  to  be  seen,  but  the  inner  truth — and  the  end 


. 


38  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

to  be  sought  by  that  apprehension  of  inner  truth  is  re- 
sponsive recognition,  the  sympathy  of  poor  mortal  for 
poor  mortal,  the  tidal  uprush  of  feeling  that  makes 
us  all  one.  Bennett,  it  seems  to  me,  cannot  evoke  it. 
His  characters,  as  they  pass,  have  a  deceptive  bril- 
liance of  outline,  but  they  soon  fade;  one  never  finds 
them  haunting  the  memory  as  Lord  Jim  haunts  it,  or 
Carrie  Meeber,  or  Huck  Finn,  or  Tom  Jones.  The 
reason  is  not  far  to  seek.  It  lies  in  the  plain  fact  that 
they  appear  to  their  creator,  not  as  men  and  women 
whose  hopes  and  agonies  are  of  poignant  concern,  not 
as  tragic  comedians  in  isolated  and  concentrated 
dramas,  but  as  mean  figures  in  an  infinitely  dispersed 
and  unintelligible  farce,  as  helpless  nobodies  in  an 
epic  struggle  that  transcends  both  their  volition  and 
their  comprehension.  Thus  viewing  them,  he  fails  to 
humanize  them  completely,  and  so  he  fails  to  make 
their  emotions  contagious.  They  are,  in  their  way, 
often  vividly  real;  they  are  thoroughly  accounted  for; 
what  there  is  of  them  is  unfailingly  life-like;  they 
move  and  breathe  in  an  environment  that  pulses  and 
glows.  But  the  attitude  of  the  author  toward  them 
remains,  in  the  end,  the  attitude  of  a  biologist  toward 
his  laboratory  animals.  He  does  not  feel  with  them 
— and  neither  does  his  reader. 

Bennett's  chief  business,  in  fact,  is  not  with  indi- 
viduals at  all,  even  though  he  occasionally  brings  them 
up  almost  to  life-size.     What  concerns  him  princi- 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  39 

pally  is  the  common  life  of  large  groups,  the  action 
and  reaction  of  castes  and  classes,  the  struggle  among 
societies.  In  particular,  he  is  engrossed  by  the  colos- 
sal and  disorderly  functioning  of  the  English  middle 
class — a  division  of  mankind  inordinately  mixed  in 
race,  confused  in  ideals  and  illogical  in  ideas.  It  is 
a  group  that  has  had  interpreters  aplenty,  past  and 
present;  a  full  half  of  the  literature  of  the  Victorian 
era  was  devoted  to  it.  But  never,  I  believe,  has  it 
had  an  interpreter  more  resolutely  detached  and  re- 
lentless— never  has  it  had  one  less  shaken  by  emo- 
tional involvement.  Here  the  very  lack  that  detracts 
so  much  from  Bennett's  stature  as  a  novelist  in  the 
conventional  sense  is  converted  into  a  valuable  posses- 
sion. Better  than  any  other  man  of  his  time  he  has 
got  upon  paper  the  social  anatomy  and  physiology  of 
the  masses  of  average,  everyday,  unimaginative  Eng- 
lishmen. One  leaves  the  long  series  of  Five  Towns 
books  with  a  sense  of  having  looked  down  the  tube 
of  a  microscope  upon  a  huge  swarm  of  infinitely  lit- 
tle but  incessantly  struggling  organisms — creatures 
engaged  furiously  in  the  pursuit  of  grotesque  and 
unintelligible  ends — helpless  participants  in  and  vic- 
tims of  a  struggle  that  takes  on,  to  their  eyes,  a  thou- 
sand lofty  purposes,  all  of  them  puerile  to  the  observer 
above  its  turmoil.  Here,  he  seems  to  say,  is  the  mid- 
dle, the  average,  the  typical  Englishman.  Here  is  the 
fellow  as  he  appears  to  himself — virtuous,  laborious, 


40  '  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 
important,  intelligent,  made  in  God's  image.  And 
here  he  is  in  fact — swinish,  ineffective,  inconsequen- 
tial, stupid,  a  feeble  parody  upon  his  maker.  It  is 
irony  that  penetrates  and  devastates,  and  it  is  unre- 
lieved by  any  show  of  the  pity  that  gets  into  the  irony 
of  Conrad,  or  of  the  tolerant  claim  of  kinship  that 
mitigates  that  of  Fielding  and  Thackeray.  It  is 
harsh  and  cocksure.  It  has,  at  its  moments,  some 
flavor  of  actual  bounderism:  one  instinctively  shrinks 
from  so  smart-alecky  a  pulling  off  of  underclothes 
and  unveiling  of  warts. 

It  is  easy  to  discern  in  it,  indeed,  a  note  of  dis- 
tinct hostility,  and  even  of  disgust.  The  long  exile 
of  the  author  is  not  without  its  significance.  He  not 
only  got  in  France  something  of  the  Frenchman's  aloof 
and  disdainful  view  of  the  English;  he  must  have 
taken  a  certain  distaste  for  the  national  scene  with  him 
in  the  first  place,  else  he  would  not  have  gone  at  all. 
The  same  attitude  shows  itself  in  W.  L.  George,  an- 
other Englishman  smeared  with  Gallic  foreignness. 
Both  men,  it  will  be  recalled,  reacted  to  the  tremen- 
dous emotional  assault  of  the  war,  not  by  yielding  to  it 
ecstatically  in  the  manner  of  the  unpolluted  islanders, 
but  by  shrinking  from  it  into  a  reserve  that  was  nat- 
urally misunderstood.  George  has  put  his  sniffs  into 
"Blind  Alley";  Bennett  has  got  his  into  "The  Pretty 
Lady."  I  do  not  say  that  either  book  is  positively 
French;  what  I  do  say  is  that  both  mirror  an  attitude 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  41 

that  has  been  somehow  emptied  of  mere  nationalism. 
An  Italian  adventure,  I  daresay,  would  have  produced 
the  same  effect,  or  a  Spanish,  or  Russian,  or  German. 
But  it  happened  to  be  French.  What  the  Bennett  story 
attempts  to  do  is  what  every  serious  Bennett  story 
attempts  to  do:  to  exhibit  dramatically  the  great  gap 
separating  the  substance  from  the  appearance  in  the 
English  character.  It  seems  to  me  that  its  prudent 
and  self-centered  G.  J.  Hoape  is  a  vastly  more  real 
Englishman  of  his  class,  and,  what  is  more,  an  Eng- 
lishman vastly  more  useful  and  creditable  to  England, 
than  any  of  the  gaudy  Bayards  and  Cids  of  conven- 
tional war  fiction.  Here,  indeed,  the  irony  somehow 
fails.  The  man  we  are  obviously  expected  to  disdain 
converts  himself,  toward  the  end,  into  a  man  not 
without  his  touches  of  the  admirable.  He  is  no  hero, 
God  knows,  and  there  is  no  more  brilliance  in  him 
than  you  will  find  in  an  average  country  squire  or 
Parliament  man,  but  he  has  the  rare  virtue  of  common 
sense,  and  that  is  probably  the  virtue  that  has  served 
the  English  better  than  all  others.  Curiously  enough, 
the  English  reading  public  recognized  the  irony  but 
failed  to  observe  its  confutation,  and  so  the  book  got 
Bennett  into  bad  odor  at  home,  and  into  worse  odor 
among  the  sedulous  apes  of  English  ideas  and  emo- 
tions on  this  side  of  the  water.  But  it  is  a  sound  work 
nevertheless — a  sound  work  with  a  large  and  unes- 
capable  defect. 


42  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

That  defect  is  visible  in  a  good  many  of  the  other 
things  that  Bennett  has  done.  It  is  the  product  of  his 
emotional  detachment  and  it  commonly  reveals  itself 
as  an  inability  to  take  his  own  story  seriously.  Some- 
times he  pokes  open  fun  at  it,  as  in  "The  Roll-Call"; 
more  often  he  simply  abandons  it  before  it  is  done, 
as  if  weary  of  a  too  tedious  foolery.  This  last  process 
is  plainly  visible  in  "The  Pretty  Lady."  The  thing 
that  gives  form  and  direction  to  that  story  is  a  simple 
enough  problem  in  psychology,  to  wit:  what  will 
happen  when  a  man  of  sound  education  and  decent 
instincts,  of  sober  age  and  prudent  habit,  of  common 
sense  and  even  of  certain  mild  cleverness — what  will 
happen,  logically  and  naturally,  when  such  a  normal, 
respectable,  cautious  fellow  finds  himself  disquiet- 
ingly  in  love  with  a  lady  of  no  position  at  all — in 
brief,  with  a  lady  but  lately  of  the  town?  Bennett 
sets  the  problem,  and  for  a  couple  of  hundred  pages 
investigates  it  with  the  utmost  ingenuity  and  address, 
exposing  and  discussing  its  sub-problems,  tracing  the 
gradual  shifting  of  its  terms,  prodding  with  sharp  in- 
sight into  the  psychological  material  entering  into  it. 
And  then,  as  if  suddenly  tired  of  it — worse,  as  if  sud- 
denly convinced  that  the  thing  has  gone  on  long  enough, 
that  he  has  given  the  public  enough  of  a  book  for 
its  money — he  forthwith  evades  the  solution  alto- 
gether, and  brings  down  his  curtain  upon  a  palpably 
artificial  denouement.     The  device  murders  the  book. 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  43 

One  is  arrested  at  the  start  by  a  fascinating  state- 
ment of  the  problem,  one  follows  a  discussi'on  of 
it  that  shows  Bennett  at  his  brilliant  best,  fertile 
in  detail,  alert  to  every  twist  of  motive,  incisively 
ironical  at  every  step — and  then,  at  the  end,  one  is 
incontinently  turned  out  of  the  booth.  The  effect  is 
that  of  being  assaulted  with  an  ice-pick  by  a  hitherto 
amiable  bartender,  almost  that  of  being  bitten  by  a 
pretty  girl  in  the  midst  of  an  amicable  buss. 

That  effect,  unluckily,  is  no  stranger  to  the  reader 
of  Bennett  novels.  One  encounters  it  in  many  of 
them.  There  is  a  tremendous  marshaling  of  meticu- 
lous and  illuminating  observation,  the  background 
throbs  with  color,  the  sardonic  humor  is  never  failing, 
it  is  a  capital  show — but  always  one  goes  away  from 
it  with  a  sense  of  having  missed  the  conclusion,  al- 
ways there  is  a  final  begging  of  the  question.  It  is 
not  hard  to  perceive  the  attitude  of  mind  underlying 
this  chronic  evasion  of  issues.  It  is,  in  essence,  ag- 
nosticism carried  to  the  last  place  of  decimals.  Life 
itself  is  meaningless;  therefore,  the  discussion  of  life 
is  meaningless;  therefore,  why  try  futilely  to  get  a 
meaning  into  it?  The  reasoning,  unluckily,  has  holes 
in  it.  It  may  be  sound  logically,  but  it  is  psycho- 
logically unworkable.  One  goes  to  novels,  not  for  the 
bald  scientific  fact,  but  for  a  romantic  amelioration  of 
it.  When  they  carry  that  amelioration  to  the  point 
of  uncritical  certainty,  when  they  are  full  of  "ideas" 


44  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

that  click  and  whirl  like  machines,  then  the  mind  re- 
volts against  the  childish  naivete  of  the  thing.  But 
when  there  is  no  organization  of  the  spectacle  at  all, 
when  it  is  presented  as  a  mere  formless  panorama, 
when  to  the  sense  of  its  unintelligibility  is  added  the 
suggestion  of  its  inherent  chaos,  then  the  mind  re- 
volts no  less.  Art  can  never  be  simple  representa- 
tion. It  cannot  deal  solely  with  precisely  what  is.  It 
must,  at  the  least,  present  the  real  in  the  light  of  some 
recognizable  ideal ;  it  must  give  to  the  eternal  farce,  if 
not  some  moral,  then  at  all  events  some  direction. 
For  without  that  formulation  there  can  be  no  clear- 
cut  separation  of  the  individual  will  from  the  gen- 
eral stew  and  turmoil  of  things,  and  without  that  sep- 
aration there  can  be  no  coherent  drama,  and  without 
that  drama  there  can  be  no  evocation  of  emotion,  and 
without  that  emotion  art  is  unimaginable.  The  field 
of  the  novel  is  very  wide.  There  is  room,  on  the  one 
side,  for  a  brilliant  play  of  ideas  and  theories,  pro- 
vided only  they  do  not  stiffen  the  struggle  of  man  wifh 
man,  or  of  man  with  destiny,  into  a  mere  struggle  of 
abstractions.  There  is  room,  on  the  other  side,  for 
the  most  complete  agnosticism,  provided  only  it  be 
tempered  by  feeling.  Joseph  Conrad  is  quite  as  un- 
shakable an  agnostic  as  Bennett;  he  is  a  ten  times  more 
implacable  ironist.  But  there  is  yet  a  place  in  his 
scheme  for  a  sardonic  sort  of  pity,  and  pity,  however 
sardonic,  is  perhaps  as  good  an  emotion  as  another. 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  45 

The  trouble  with  Bennett  is  that  he  essays  to  sneer,  not 
only  at  the  futile  aspiration  of  man,  but  also  at  the 
agony  that  goes  with  it.  The  result  is  an  air  of  af- 
fectation, of  superficiality,  almost  of  stupidity.  The 
manner,  on  the  one  hand,  is  that  of  a  highly  skillful 
and  profoundly  original  artist,  but  on  the  other  hand 
it  is  that  of  a  sophomore  just  made  aware  of  Haeckel, 
Bradlaugh  and  Nietzsche. 

Bennett's  unmitigated  skepticism  explains  two 
things  that  have  constantly  puzzled  the  reviewers,  and 
that  have  been  the  cause  of  a  great  deal  of  idiotic  writ- 
ing about  him — for  him  as  well  as  against  him.  One 
of  these  things  is  his  utter  lack  of  anything  properly 
describable  as  artistic  conscience — his  extreme  readi- 
ness to  play  the  star  houri  in  the  seraglio  of  the  pub- 
lishers; the  other  is  his  habit  of  translating  platitudes 
into  racy  journalese  and  gravely  offering  them  to 
the  suburban  trade  as  "pocket  philosophies."  Both 
crimes,  it  seems  to  me,  have  their  rise  in  his  congenital 
incapacity  for  taking  ideas  seriously,  even  including 
his  own.  "If  this,"  he  appears  to  say,  "is  the  tosh 
you  want,  then  here  is  another  dose  of  it.  Personally, 
I  have  little  interest  in  that  sort  of  thing.  Even  good 
novels — the  best  I  can  do — are  no  more  than  com- 
promises with  a  silly  convention.  I  am  not  interested 
in  stories;  I  -am  interested  in  the  anatomy  of  human 
melancholy;  I  am  a  descriptive  sociologist,  with  over- 
tones of  malice.     But  if  you  want  stories,  and  can  pay 


46  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

for  them,  I  am  willing  to  give  them  to  you.  And  if 
you  prefer  bad  stories,  then  here  is  a  bad  one.  Don't 
assume  you  can  shame  me  by  deploring  my  willing- 
ness. Think  of  what  your  doctors  do  every  day,  and 
your  lawyers,  and  your  men  of  God,  and  your  stock- 
brokers, and  your  traders  and  politicians.  I  am 
surely  no  worse  than  the  average.  In  fact,  I  am  prob- 
ably a  good  deal  superior  to  the  average,  for  I  am  at 
least  not  deceived  by  my  own  mountebankery — I  at 
least  know  my  sound  goods  from  my  shoddy."  Such, 
I  daresay,  is  the  process  of  thought  behind  such  hol- 
low trade-goods  -as  "Buried  Alive"  and  "The  Lion's 
Share."  One  does  not  need  the  man's  own  amazing 
\  confidences  to  hear  his  snickers  at  his  audience,  at  his 
work  and  at  himself. 

The  books  of  boiled-mutton  "philosophy"  in  the 
manner  of  Dr.  Orison  Swett  Marden  and  Dr.  Frank 
Crane  and  the  occasional  pot-boilers  for  the  news- 
papers and  magazines  probably  have  much  the  same 
origin.  What  appears  in  them  is  not  a  weakness  for 
ideas  that  are  stale  and  obvious,  but  a  distrust  of  all 
ideas  whatsoever.  The  public,  with  its  mob  yearning 
to  be  instructed,  edified  and  pulled  by  the  nose,  de- 
mands certainties;  it  must  be  told  definitely  and  a  bit 
raucously  that  this  is  true  and  that  is  false.  But  there 
are  no  certainties.  Ergo,  one  notion  is  as  good  as 
another,  and  if  it  happens  to  be  utter  flubdub,  so  much 
the  better — for  it  is  precisely  flubdub  that  penetrates 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  47 

the  popular  skull  with  the  greatest  facility.  The  way 
is  already  made:  the  hole  already  gapes.  An  effort 
to  approach  the  hidden  and  baffling  truth  would  simply 
burden  the  enterprise  with  difficulty.  Moreover,  the 
effort  is  intrinsically  laborious  and  ungrateful.  More- 
over, there  is  probably  no  hidden  truth  to  be  uncov- 
ered. Thus,  by  the  route  of  skepticism,  Bennett  ap- 
parently arrives  at  his  sooth-saying.  That  he  actu- 
ally believes  in  his  own  theorizing  is  inconceivable. 
He  is  far  too  intelligent  a  man  to  hold  that  any  truths 
within  the  comprehension  of  the  popular  audience  are 
sound  enough  to  be  worth  preaching,  or  that  it  would 
do  any  good  to  preach  them  if  they  were.  No  doubt 
he  is  considerably  amused  in  petto  by  the  gravity  with 
which  his  bedizened  platitudes  have  been  received  by 
persons  accustomed  to  that  sort  of  fare,  particularly 
in  America.  It  would  be  interesting  to  hear  his  pri- 
vate view  of  the  corn-fed  critics  who  hymn  him  as  a 
profound  and  impassioned  moralist,  with  a  mission  to 
rescue  the  plain  people  from  tire  heresies  of  such  fel- 
lows as  Dreiser. 

So  much  for  two  of  the  salient  symptoms  of  his 
underlying  skepticism.  Another  is  to  be  found  in  his 
incapacity  to  be,  in  the  ordinary  sense,  ingratiating; 
it  is  simply  beyond  him  to  say  the  pleasant  thing 
with  any  show  of  sincerity.  Of  all  his  books,  prob- 
ably the  worst  are  his  book  on  the  war  and  his  book 
on  the  United  States.     The  latter  was  obviously  un- 


48  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

dertaken  with  some  notion  of  paying  off  a  debt.  Ben- 
nett had  been  to  the  United  States;  the  newspapers 
had  hailed  him  in  their  side-show  way;  the  women's 
clubs  had  pawed  over  him;  he  had,  no  doubt,  come 
home  a  good  deal  richer.  What  he  essayed  to  do  was 
to  write  a  volume  on  the  republic  that  should  be  at 
once  colorably  accurate  and  discreetly  agreeable. 
The  enterprise  was  quite  beyond  him.  The  book  not 
only  failed  to  please  Americans;  it  offended  them  in 
a  thousand  subtle  ways,  and  from  its  appearance 
dates  the  decline  of  the  author's  vogue  among  us.  He 
is  not,  of  course,  completely  forgotten,  but  it  must  be 
plain  that  Wells  now  stands  a  good  deal  above  him  in 
the  popular  estimation — even  the  later  Wells  of  bad 
novel  after  bad  novel.  His  war  book  missed  fire  in 
much  the  same  way.  It  was  workmanlike,  it  was  de- 
liberately urbane,  it  was  undoubtedly  truthful — but  it 
fell  flat  in  England  and  it  fell  flat  in  America.  There 
is  no  little  significance  in  the  fact  that  the  British 
government,  in  looking  about  for  English  authors 
to  uphold  the  British  cause  in  America  and  labor  for 
American  participation  in  the  war,  found  no  useful- 
ness in  Bennett.  Practically  every  other  novelist 
with  an  American  audience  was  drafted  for  service, 
but  not  Bennett.  He  was  non  est  during  the  heat  of 
the  fray,  and  when  at  length  he  came  forward  with 
"The  Pretty  Lady"  the  pained  manner  with  which  it 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  49 

was  received  quite  justified  the  judgment  of  those  who 
had  passed  him  over. 

What  all  this  amounts  to  may  be  very  briefly  put:  in 
one  of  the  requisite  qualities  of  the  first-rate  novelist 
Bennett  is  almost  completely  lacking,  and  so  it  would 
be  no  juggling  with  paradox  to  argue  that,  at  bottom, 
he  is  scarcely  a  novelist  at  all.  His  books,  indeed, — 
that  is,  his  serious  books,  the  books  of  his  better  canon 
— often  fail  utterly  to  achieve  the  effect  that  one  as- 
sociates with  the  true  novel.  One  carries  away  from 
them,  not  the  impression  of  a  definite  transaction,  not 
the  memory  of  an  outstanding  and  appealing  person- 
ality, not  the  after-taste  of  a  profound  emotion,  but 
merely  the  sense  of  having  witnessed  a  gorgeous  but 
incomprehensible  parade,  coming  out  of  nowhere  and 
going  to  God  knows  where.  They  are  magnificent  as 
representation,  they  bristle  with  charming  detail,  they 
radiate  the  humors  of  an  acute  and  extraordinary  man, 
they  are  entertainment  of  the  best  sort — but  there  is 
seldom  anything  in  them  of  that  clear,  well-aimed 
and  solid  effect  which  one  associates  with  the  novel 
as  work  of  art.  Most  of  these  books,  indeed,  are  no 
more  than  collections  of  essays  defectively  dramatized. 
What  is  salient  in  them  is  not  their  people,  but  their 
backgrounds — and  their  people  are  forever  fading  ., 
into  their  backgrounds.  Is  there  a  character  in  any 
of  these  books  that  shows  any  sign  of  living  as  Pen- 


50  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

dennis  lives,  and  Barry  Lyndon,  and  Emma  Bovary, 
and  David  Copperfield,  and  the  George  Moore  who  is 
always  his  own  hero?  Who  remembers  much  about 
Sophia  Baines,  save  that  she  lived  in  the  Five  Towns, 
or  even  about  Clayhanger?  Young  George  Cannon, 
in  "The  Roll-Call,"  is  no  more  than  an  anatomical 
chart  in  a  lecture  on  modern  marriage.  Hilda  Less- 
ways-Cannon-Clayhanger  is  not  only  inscrutable;  she 
is  also  dim.  The  man  and  woman  of  "Whom  God 
Hath  Joined,"  perhaps  the  best  of  all  the  Bennett  nov- 
els, I  have  so  far  forgotten  that  I  cannot  remember 
their  names.  Even  Denry  the  Audacious  grows 
misty.  One  remembers  that  he  was  the  center  of  the 
farce,  but  now  he  is  long  gone  and  the  farce  remains. 
This  constant  remainder,  whether  he  be  actually 
novelist  or  no  novelist,  is  sufficient  to  save  Bennett,  it 
seems  to  me,  from  the  swift  oblivion  that  so  often  over- 
takes the  popular  fictioneer.  He  may  not  play  the 
game  according  to  the  rules,  but  the  game  that  he 
plays  is  nevertheless  extraordinarily  diverting  and 
calls  for  an  incessant  display  of  the  finest  sort  of 
skill.  No  writer  of  his  time  has  looked  into  the  life 
of  his  time  with  sharper  eyes,  or  set  forth  his  findings 
with  a  greater  charm  and  plausibility.  Within  his 
deliberately  narrow  limits  he  had  done  precisely  the 
thing  that  Balzac  undertook  to  do,  and  Zola  after  him : 
he  has  painted  a  full-length  portrait  of  a  whole  so- 
ciety, accurately,  brilliantly  and,  in  certain  areas, 


ARNOLD  BENNETT  51 

almost  exhaustively.  The  middle  Englishman — not 
the  individual,  but  the  type — is  there  displayed  more 
vividly  than  he  is  displayed  anywhere  else  that  I  know 
of.  The  thing  is  rigidly  held  to  its  aim;  there  is  no 
episodic  descent  or  ascent  to  other  fields.  But  within 
that  one  field  every  resource  of  observation,  of  inven- 
tion and  of  imagination  has  been  brought  to  bear  upon 
the  business — every  one  save  that  deep  feeling  for 
man  in  his  bitter  tragedy  which  is  the  most  important 
of  them  all.  Bennett,  whatever  his  failing  in  this 
capital  function  of  the  artist,  is  certainly  of  the  very 
highest  consideration  as  craftsman.  Scattered 
through  his  books,  even  his  bad  books,  there  are  frag- 
ments of  writing  that  are  quite  unsurpassed  in  our 
day — the  shoe-shining  episode  in  "The  Pretty  Lady," 
the  adulterous  interlude  in  "Whom  God  Hath  Jomed," 
the  dinner  party  in  "Paris  Nights,"  the  whole  discus- 
sion of  the  Cannon-Ingram  marriage  in  "The  Roll- 
Call,"  the  studio  party  in  "The  Lion's  Share."  Such 
writing  is  rare  and  exhilarating.  It  is  to  be  respected. 
And  the  man  who  did  it  is  not  to  be  dismissed. 


IV.    THE    DEAN 

AMERICANS,  obsessed  by  the  problem  of 
conduct,  usually  judge  their  authors,  not  as 
artists,  but  as  citizens,  Christians,  men. 
Edgar  Allan  Poe,  I  daresay,  will  never  live  down  the 
fact  that  he  was  a  periodical  drunkard,  and  died  in 
an  alcoholic  ward.  Mark  Twain,  the  incomparable 
artist,  will  probably  never  shake  off  Mark  Twain,  the 
after-dinner  comedian,  the  Haunter  of  white  dress 
clothes,  the  public  character,  the  national  wag.  As 
for  William  Dean  Howells,  he  gains  rather  than  loses 
by  this  confusion  of  values,  for,  like  the  late  Joseph 
H.  Choate,  he  is  almost  the  national  ideal:  an 'urbane 
and  highly  respectable  old  gentleman,  a  sitter  on 
committees,  an  intimate  of  professors  and  the 
prophets  of  movements,  a  worthy  vouched  for  by 
both  the  Atlantic  Monthly  and  Alexander  Har- 
vey, a  placid  conformist.  The  result  is  his  general 
acceptance  as  a  member  of  the  literary  peerage,  and 
of  the  rank  of  earl  at  least.  For  twenty  years  past 
his  successive  books  have  not  been  criticized,  nor 
even  adequately  reviewed;  they  have  been  merely 
fawned   over;   the   lady   critics   of   the   newspapers 

52 


THE  DEAN  53 

would  no  more  question  them  than  they  would  ques- 
tion Lincoln's  Gettysburg  speech,  or  Paul  Elmer  More, 
I  or  their  own  virginity.  The  dean  of  American  letters 
in  point  of  years,  and  in  point  of  published  quantity, 
and  in  point  of  public  prominence  and  influence,  he 
has  been  gradually  enveloped  in  a  web  of  supersti- 
tious reverence,  and  it  grates  harshly  to  hear  his  actual 
achievement  discussed  in  cold  blood. 

Nevertheless,  all  this  merited  respect  for  an  in- 
dustrious and  inoffensive  man  is  bound,  soon  or  late, 
to  yield  to  a  critical  examination  of  the  artist  within, 
and  that  examination,  I  fear,  will  have  its  bitter  mo- 
ments for  those  who  naively  accept  the  Howells  le- 
gend. It  will  show,  without  doubt,  a  first-rate  jour- 
neyman, a  contriver  of  pretty  things,  a  clever  stylist 
— but  it  will  also  show  a  long  row  of  uninspired  and 
hollow  books,  with  no  more  ideas  in  them  than  so 
many  volumes  of  the  Ladies'  Home  Journal,  and  no 
more  deep  and  contagious  feeling  than  so  many  re- 
ports of  autopsies,  and  no  more  glow  and  gusto  than 
so  many  tables  of  bond  prices.  The  profound  dread 
and  agony  of  life,  the  surge  of  passion  and  aspiration, 
the  grand  crash  and  glitter  of  things,  the  tragedy  that 
runs  eternally  under  the  surface — all  this  the  critic 
of  the  future  will  seek  in  vain  in  Dr.  Howells'  elegant 
and  shallow  volumes.  And  seeking  it  in  vain,  he  will 
probably  dismiss  all  of  them  together  with  fewer 
words  than  he  gives  to  "Huckleberry  Finn."  .  .  . 


54  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Already,  indeed,  the  Howells  legend  tends  to  be- 
come a  mere  legend,  and  empty  of  all  genuine  sig- 
nificance. Who  actually  reads  the  Howells  novels? 
Who  even  remembers  their  names?  "The  Minister's 
Charge,"  "An  Imperative  Duty,"  "The  Unexpected 
Guests,"  "Out  of  the  Question,"  "No  Love  Lost"— 
these  titles  are  already  as  meaningless  as  a  roll  of 
Sumerian  kings.  Perhaps  "The  Rise  of  Silas  Lap- 
ham"  survives — but  go  read  it  if  you  would  tumble 
downstairs.  The  truth  about  Howells  is  that  he 
really  has  nothing  to  say,  for  all  the  charm  he  gets 
into  saying  it.  His  psychology  is  superficial,  ama- 
teurish, often  nonsensical;  his  irony  is  scarcely  more 
than  a  polite  facetiousness;  his  characters  simply  re- 
fuse to  live.  No  figure  even  remotely  comparable  to 
Norris'  McTeague  or  Dreiser's  Frank  Cowperwood 
is  to  be  encountered  in  his  novels.  He  is  quite  un- 
equal to  any  such  evocation  of  the  race-spirit,  of  the 
essential  conflict  of  forces  among  us,  of  the  peculiar 
drift  and  color  of  American  life.  The  world  he 
moves  in  is  suburban,  caged,  flabby.  He  could  no 
more  have  written  the  last  chapters  of  "Lord  Jim" 
than  he  could  have  written  the  Book  of  Mark. 

The  vacuity  of  his  method  is  well  revealed  by  one 
of  the  books  of  his  old  age,"The  Leatherwood  God." 
Its  composition,  we  are  told,  spread  over  many  years; 
its  genesis  was  in  the  days  of  his  full  maturity.  An 
examination  of  it  shows  nothing  but  a  suave  piling 


THE  DEAN  55 

up  of  words,  a  vast  accumulation  of  nothings.  The 
central  character,  one  Dylks,  is  a  backwoods  evangel- 
ist who  acquires  a  belief  in  his  own  buncombe,  and 
ends  by  announcing  that  he  is  God.  The  job  before 
the  author  was  obviously  that  of  tracing  the  psycho- 
logical steps  whereby  this  mountebank  proceeds  to 
that  conclusion;  the  fact,  indeed,  is  recognized  in  the 
canned  review,  which  says  that  the  book  is  "a  study 
of  American  religious  psychology."  But  an  in- 
spection of  the  text  shows  that  no  such  study  is  really 
in  it.  Dr.  Howells  does  not  show  how  Dylks  came  to 
believe  himself  God;  he  merely  says  that  he  did  so. 
The  whole  discussion  of  the  process,  indeed,  is  con- 
fined to  two  pages — 172  and  173 — and  is  quite  in- 
fantile in  its  inadequacy.  Nor  do  we  get  anything 
approaching  a  revealing  look  into  the  heads  of  the 
other  converts — the  saleratus-sodden,  hell-crazy,  half- 
witted Methodists  and  Baptists  of  a  remote  Ohio  set- 
tlement of  seventy  or  eighty  years  ago.  All  we  have 
is  the  casual  statement  that  they  are  converted,  and 
begin  to  offer  Dylks  their  howls  of  devotion.  And 
when,  in  the  end,  they  go  back  to  their  original  bosh, 
dethroning  Dylks  overnight  and  restoring  the  gaseous 
vertebrate  of  Calvin  and  Wesley — when  this  contrary 
process  is  recorded,  it  is  accompanied  by  no  more  il- 
lumination. In  brief,  the  story  is  not  a  "study"  at 
all,  whether  psychological  or  otherwise,  but  simply 
an  anecdote,  and  without  either  point  or  interest.     Its 


56  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

virtues  are  all  negative  ones:  it  is  short,  it  keeps  on 
the  track,  it  deals  with  a  religious  maniac  and  yet  con- 
trives to  offer  no  offense  to  other  religious  maniacs. 
But  on  the  positive  side  it  merely  skims  the  skin. 

So  in  all  of  the  other  Howells  novels  that  I  know. 
Somehow,  he  seems  blissfully  ignorant  that  life  is  a 
serious  business,  and  full  of  mystery;  it  is  a  sort  of 
college  town  Weltanschauung  that  one  finds  in  him; 
he  is  an  Agnes  Repplier  in  pantaloons.  In  one  of  the 
later  stories,  "New  Leaf  Mills,"  he  makes  a  faltering 
gesture  of  recognition.  Here,  so  to  speak,  one  gets 
at  least  a  sniff  of  the  universal  mystery ;  Howells  seems 
about  to  grow  profound  at  last.  But  the  sniff  is  only 
a  sniff.  The  tragedy,  at  the  end,  peters  out.  Com- 
pare the  story  to  E.  W.  Howe's  "The  Story  of  a  Coun- 
try Town,"  which  Howells  himself  has  intelligently 
praised,  and  you  will  get  some  measure  of  his  own 
failure.  Howe  sets  much  the  same  stage  and  deals 
with  much  the  same  people.  His  story  is  full  of 
technical  defects — for  one  thing,  it  is  overladen  with 
melodrama  and  sentimentality.  But  nevertheless  it 
achieves  the  prime  purpose  of  a  work  of  the  imagina- 
tion: it  grips  and  stirs  the  emotions,  it  implants  a 
sense  of  something  experienced.  Such  a  book  leaves 
scars;  one  is  not  quite  the  same  after  reading  it.  But 
it  would  be  difficult  to  point  to  a  Howells  book  that 
produces  any  such  effect.  If  he  actually  tries,  like 
Conrad,  "to  make  you  hear,  to  make  you  feel — be- 


THE  DEAN  57 

fore  all,  to  make  you  see,"  then  he  fails  almost  com- 
pletely. One  often  suspects,  indeed,  that  he  doesn't 
really  feel  or  see  himself.  .  .  . 

As  a  critic  he  belongs  to  a  higher  level,  if  only  be- 
cause of  his  eager  curiosity,  his  gusto  in  novelty. 
His  praise  of  Howe  I  have  mentioned.  He  dealt 
valiant  licks  for  other  debutantes:  Frank  Norris, 
Edith  Wharton  and  William  Vaughn  Moody  among 
them.  He  brought  forward  the  Russians  diligently 
and  persuasively,  albeit  they  left  no  mark  upon  his 
own  manner.  In  his  ingratiating  way,  back  in  the 
seventies  and  eighties,  he  made  war  upon  the  pre- 
vailing sentimentalities.  But  his  history  as  a  critic 
is  full  of  errors  and  omissions.  One  finds  him  loos- 
ing a  fanfare  for  W.  B.  Trites,  the  Philadelphia  Zola, 
and  praising  Frank  A.  Munsey — and  one  finds  him 
leaving  the  discovery  of  all  the  Shaws,  George 
Moores,  Dreisers,  Synges,  Galsworthys,  Phillipses 
and  George  Ades  to  the  Pollards,  Meltzers  and  Hu- 
nekers.  Busy  in  the  sideshows,  he  didn't  see  the  ele- 
phants go  by.  .  .  .  Here  temperamental  defects 
handicapped  him.  Turn  to  his  "My  Mark  Twain" 
and  you  will  see  what  I  mean.  The  Mark  that  is  ex- 
hibited in  this  book  is  a  Mark  whose  Himalayan  out- 
lines are  discerned  but  hazily  through  a  pink  fog  of 
Howells.  There  is  a  moral  note  in  the  tale — an  ob- 
vious effort  to  palliate,  to  touch  up,  to  excuse.  The 
poor  fellow,  of  course,  was  charming,  and  there  was 


58  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

talent  in  him,  but  what  a  weakness  he  had  for  think- 
ing aloud — and  such  shocking  thoughts!  What  oaths 
in  his  speech!  What  awful  cigars  he  smoked! 
How  barbarous  his  contempt  for  the  strict  sonata 
form!  It  seems  incredible,  indeed,  that  two  men  so 
unlike  should  have  found  common  denominators  for 
a  friendship  lasting  forty-four  years.  The  one  de- 
rived from  Rabelais,  Chaucer,  the  Elizabethans  and 
Benvenuto — buccaneers  of  the  literary  high  seas, 
loud  laughers,  law-breakers,  giants  of  a  lordlier  day; 
the  other  came  down  from  Jane  Austen,  Washington 
Irving  and  Hannah  More.  The  one  wrote  English 
as  Michelangelo  hacked  marble,  broadly,  brutally, 
magnificently;  the  other  was  a  maker  of  pretty  waxen 
groups.  The  one  was  utterly  unconscious  of  the  way 
he  achieved  his  staggering  effects;  the  other  was  the 
most  toilsome,  fastidious  and  self-conscious  of  crafts- 
men. .  .  . 

What  remains  of  Howells  is  his  style.  He  in- 
vented a  new  harmony  of  "the  old,  old  words."  He 
destroyed  the  stately  periods  of  the  Poe  tradition,  and 
erected  upon  the  ruins  a  complex  and  savory  care- 
lessness, full  of  naivetes  that  were  sophisticated  to 
the  last  degree.  He  loosened  the  tightness  of  Eng- 
lish, and  let  a  blast  of  Elizabethan  air  into  it.  He 
achieved,  for  all  his  triviality,  for  all  his  narrowness 
of  vision,  a  pungent  and  admirable  style. 


V.    PROFESSOR   VEBLEN 

TEN  or  twelve  years  ago,  being  engaged  in  a 
bombastic  discussion  with  what  was  then 
known  as  an  intellectual  Socialist  (like  the 
rest  of  the  intelligentsia,  he  succumbed  to  the  first 
life-corps  of  the  war,  pulled  down  the  red  flag, 
damned  Marx  as  a  German  spy,  and  began  whooping 
for  Elihu  Root,  Otto  Kahn  and  Abraham  Lincoln), 
I  was  greatly  belabored  and  incommoded  by  his  long 
quotations  from  a  certain  Prof.  Dr.  Thorstein  Veblen, 
then  quite  unknown  to  me.  My  antagonist  manifestly 
attached  a  great  deal  of  importance  to  these  borrowed 
sagacities,  for  he  often  heaved  them  at  me  in  lengths 
of  a  column  or  two,  and  urged  me  to  read  every  word 
of  them.  I  tried  hard  enough,  but  found  it  impos- 
sible going.  The  more  I  read  them,  in  fact,  the  less 
I  could  make  of  them,  and  so  in  the  end,  growing  im- 
patient and  impolite,  I  denounced  this  Prof.  Veblen 
as  a  geyser  of  pishposh,  refused  to  waste  any  more 
time  upon  his  incomprehensible  syllogisms,  and  ap- 
plied myself  to  the  other  Socialist  witnesses  in  the 
case,  seeking  to  set  fire  to  their  shirts. 

That  old  debate,  which  took  place  by  mail  (for  the 

59 


60  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Socialist  lived  like  a  munitions  patriot  on  his  country 
estate  and  I  was  a  wage-slave  attached  to  a  city  news- 
paper), was  afterward  embalmed  in  a  dull  book,  and 
made  the  mild  pother  of  a  day.  The  book,  by  name, 
"Men  vs.  the  Man,"  is  now  as  completely  forgotten  as 
Baxter's  "Saint's  Rest"  or  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States.  I  myself,  perhaps  the  only  man  who 
remembers  it  at  all,  have  not  looked  into  it  for  six 
or  eight  years,  and  all  I  can  recall  of  my  opponent's 
argument  (beyond  the  fact  that  it  not  only  failed  to 
convert  me  to  the  nascent  Bolshevism  of  the  time,  but 
left  me  a  bitter  and  incurable  scoffer  at  democracy  in 
all  its  forms)  is  his  curious  respect  for  the  aforesaid 
Prof.  Dr.  Thorstein  Veblen,  and  his  delight  in  the 
learned  gentleman's  long,  tortuous  and  (to  me,  at 
least)  intolerably  flapdoodlish  phrases. 

There  was,  indeed,  a  time  when  I  forgot  even  this 
— when  my  mind  was  empty  of  the  professor's  very 
name.  That  was,  say,  from  1909  or  thereabout  to 
the  middle  of  1917.  During  those  years,  having  lost 
all  my  old  superior  interest  in  Socialism,  even  as  an 
amateur  psychiatrist,  I  ceased  to  read  its  literature, 
and  thus  lost  track  of  its  Great  Thinkers.  The 
periodicals  that  I  then  gave  an  eye  to,  setting  aside 
newspapers,  were  chiefly  the  familiar  American  imi- 
tations of  the  English  weeklies  of  opinion,  and  in 
these  the  dominant  Great  Thinker  was,  first,  the  late 
Prof.   Dr.  William  James,   and,   after  his   decease, 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  61 

Prof.  Dr.  John  Dewey.  The  reign  of  James,  as  the 
illuminated  will  recall,  was  long  and  glorious.  For 
three  or  four  years  running  he  was  mentioned  in  every 
one  of  those  American  Spectators  and  Saturday  Re- 
views at  least  once  a  week,  and  often  a  dozen  times. 
Among  the  less  somber  gazettes  of  the  republic,  to  be 
sure,  there  were  other  heroes:  Maeterlinck,  Rabin- 
dranath  Tagore,  Judge  Ben  B.  Lindsey,  the  late  Ma- 
jor-General  Roosevelt,  Tom  Lawson  and  so  on.  Still 
further  down  the  literary  and  intellectual  scale  there 
were  yet  others:  Hall  Caine,  Brieux  and  Jack  John- 
son among  them,  with  paper-bag  cookery  and  the  twi- 
light sleep  to  dispute  their  popularity.  But  on  the 
majestic  level  of  the  old  Nation,  among  the  white  and 
lavender  peaks  of  professorial  ratiocination,  there  was 
scarcely  a  serious  rival  to  James.  Now  and  then, 
perhaps,  Jane  Addams  had  a  month  of  vogue,  and 
during  one  winter  there  was  a  rage  for  Bergson,  and 
for  a  short  space  the  unspeakable  Bernstorff  tried  to 
set  up  Eucken  (now  damned  with  Wagner,  Nietzsche 
and  Ludendorff),  but  taking  one  day  with  another 
James  held  his  own  against  the  field.  His  ideas,  im- 
mediately they  were  stated,  became  the  ideas  of  every 
pedagogue  from  Harvard  to  Leland  Stanford,  and  the 
pedagogues,  laboring  furiously  at  space  rates, 
rammed  them  into  the  skulls  of  the  lesser  cerebelli. 
To  have  called  James  an  ass,  during  the  year  1909, 
would  have  been  as  fatal  as  to  have  written  a  sentence 


62  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

like  this  one  without  having  used  so  many  haves. 
He  died  a  bit  later,  but  his  ghost  went  marching  on: 
it  took  three  or  four  years  to  interpret  and  pigeon- 
hole his  philosophical  remains  and  to  take  down  and 
redact  his  messages  (via  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  Little 
Brighteyes,  Wah-Wah  the  Indian  Chief,  and  other 
gifted  psychics)  from  the  spirit  world.  But  then, 
gradually,  he  achieved  the  ultimate,  stupendous  and 
irrevocable  act  of  death,  and  mere  was  a  vacancy. 
To  it  Prof.  Dr.  Dewey  was  elected  by  the  acclamation 
of  all  right-thinking  and  forward-looking  men.  He 
was  an  expert  in  pedagogics,  metaphysics,  psychology, 
ethics,  logic,  politics,  pedagogical  metaphysics,  meta- 
physical psychology,  psychological  ethics,  ethical 
logic,  logical  politics  and  political  pedagogics.  He 
was  Artium  Magister,  Philosophies  Doctor  and  twice 
Legum  Doctor.  He  had  written  a  book  called  "How 
to  Think."  He  sat  in  a  professor's  chair  and  caned 
sophomores  for  blowing  spit-balls.  Ergo,  he  was  the 
ideal  candidate,  and  so  he  was  nominated,  elected  and 
inaugurated,  and  for  three  years,  more  or  less,  he  en- 
joyed a  peaceful  reign  in  the  groves  of  sapience,  and 
the  inferior  umbilicarii  venerated  him  as  they  had 
once  venerated  James. 

I  myself  greatly  enjoyed  and  profited  by  the  dis- 
courses of  this  Prof.  Dewey  and  was  in  hopes  that  he 
would  last.  Born  so  recently  as  1859  and  a  man  of 
the  highest  bearable  sobriety,  he  seemed  likely  to  peg 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  63 

along  until  1935  or  1940,  a  gentle  and  charming  vol- 
cano of  correct  thought.  But  it  was  not,  alas,  to  be. 
Under  cover  of  pragmatism,  that  serpent's  meta- 
physic,  there  was  unrest  beneath  the  surface.  Young 
professors  in  remote  and  obscure  universities,  ap- 
parently as  harmless  as  so  many  convicts  in  the  death- 
house,  were  secretly  flirting  with  new  and  red-hot 
ideas.  Whole  regiments  and  brigades  of  them 
yielded  in  stealthy  privacy  to  rebellious  and  often 
incomprehensible  yearnings.  Now  and  then,  as  if  to 
reveal  what  was  brewing,  a  hell  fire  blazed  and  a 
Prof.  Dr.  Scott  Nearing  went  sky-hooting  through  its 
smoke.  One  heard  whispers  of  strange  heresies — 
economic,  sociological,  even  political.  Gossip  had 
it  that  pedagogy  was  hatching  vipers,  nay,  was  al- 
ready brought  to  bed.  But  not  much  of  this  got 
into  the  home-made  Saturday  Reviews  and  Yankee 
Athenceums — a  hint  or  two  maybe,  but  no  more.  In 
the  main  they  kept  to  their  old  resolute  demands  for 
a  pure  civil-service,  the  budget  system  in  Congress, 
the  abolition  of  hazing  at  the  Naval  Academy,  an 
honest  primary  and  justice  to  the  Filipinos,  with  ex- 
termination of  the  Prussian  serpent  added  after 
August,  1914.  And  Dr.  Dewey,  on  his  remote  So- 
cratic  Alp,  pursued  the  calm  reenforcement  of  the 
philosophical  principles  underlying  these  and  all 
other  lofty  and  indignant  causes.  .  .  . 

Then,   of  a   sudden,   Siss!     Boom!     Ah!     Then, 


64  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

overnight,  the  upspringing  of  the  intellectual  Soviets, 
the  headlong  assault  upon  all  the  old  axioms  of 
pedagogical  speculation,  the  nihilistic  dethronement 
of  Prof.  Dewey — and  rah,  rah,  rah  for  Prof.  Dr. 
Thorstein  Veblen!  Veblen?  Could  it  be — ?  Aye, 
it  was!  My  old  acquaintance!  The  Doctor  obscurus 
of  my  half-forgotten  bout  with  the  so-called  intel- 
lectual Socialist!  The  Great  Thinker  redivivusl 
Here,  indeed,  he  was  again,  and  in  a  few  months — 
almost  it  seemed  a  few  days — he  was  all  over  the 
Nation,  the  Dial,  the  New  Republic  and  the  rest  of 
them,  and  his  books  and  pamphlets  began  to  pour 
from  the  presses,  and  the  newspapers  reported  his 
every  wink  and  whisper,  and  everybody  who  was  any- 
body began  gabbling  about  him.  The  spectacle,  I 
do  not  hesitate  to  say,  somewhat  disconcerted  me  and 
even  distressed  me.  On  the  one  hand,  I  was  sorry  to 
see  so  learned  and  interesting  a  man  as  Dr.  Dewey 
sent  back  to  the  insufferable  dungeons  of  Columbia, 
there  to  lecture  in  imperfect  Yiddish  to  classes  of 
Grand  Street  Platos.  And  on  the  other  hand,  I 
shrunk  supinely  from  the  appalling  job,  newly  rear- 
ing itself  before  me,  of  re-reading  the  whole  canon 
of  the  singularly  laborious  and  muggy,  the  incompar- 
ably tangled  and  unintelligible  works  of  Prof.  Dr. 
Thorstein  Veblen.  .  .  . 

But  if  a  sense  of  duty  tortures  a  man,  it  also  en- 
ables him  to  achieve  prodigies,  and  so  I  managed  to 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  65 

get  through  the  whole  infernal  job.  I  read  "The 
Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class,"  I  read  "The  Theory  of 
Business  Enterprise,"  and  then  I  read  "The  Instinct 
of  Workmanship."  An  hiatus  followed ;  I  was  racked 
by  a  severe  neuralgia,  with  delusions  of  persecution. 
On  recovering  I  tackled  "Imperial  Germany  and  the 
Industrial  Revolution."  Malaria  for  a  month,  and 
then  "The  Nature  of  Peace  and  the  Terms  of  Its  Per- 
petuation." What  ensued  was  never  diagnosed; 
probably  it  was  some  low  infection  of  the  mesentery 
or  spleen.  When  it  passed  off,  leaving  only  an 
asthmatic  cough,  I  read  "The  Higher  Learning  in 
America,"  and  then  went  to  Mt.  Clemens  to  drink  the 
Glauber's  salts.  Eureka!  the  business  was  done!  It 
had  strained  me,  but  now  it  was  over.  Alas,  a  good 
part  of  the  agony  had  been  needless.  What  I  found 
myself  aware  of,  coming  to  the  end,  was  that  prac- 
tically the  whole  system  of  Prof.  Dr.  Veblen  was  in 
his  first  book  and  his  last — that  is,  in  "The  Theory  of 
the  Leisure  Class,"  and  "The  Higher  Learning  in 
America."  I  pass  on  the  good  news.  Read  these 
two,  and  you  won't  have  to  read  the  others.  And  if 
even  two  daunt  you,  then  read  the  first.  Once 
through  it,  though  you  will  have  missed  many  a  pearl 
and  many  a  pain,  you  will  have  a  fairly  good  general 
acquaintance  with  the  gifted  metaphysician's  ideas. 

For  those  ideas,  in  the  main,  are  quite  simple,  and 
often  anything  but  revolutionary  in  essence.     What 


66  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

is  genuinely  remarkable  about  them  is  not  their  nov- 
elty, or  their  complexity,  nor  even  the  fact  that  a  pro- 
fessor should  harbor  them;  it  is  the  astoundingly 
grandiose  and  rococo  manner  of  their  statement,  the 
almost  unbelievable  tediousness  and  flatulence  of  the 
gifted  headmaster's  prose,  his  unprecedented  talent 
for  saying  nothing  in  an  august  and  heroic  manner. 
There  are  tales  of  an  actress  of  the  last  generation, 
probably  Sarah  Bernhardt,  who  couhjkput  pathos  and 
even  terror  into  a  recitation  of  the  multiplication  table. 
The  late  Louis  James  did  something  of  the  sort;  he 
introduced  limericks  into  "Peer  Gynt"  and  still  held 
the  yokelry  agape.  The  same  talent,  raised  to  a  high 
power,  is  in  this  Prof.  Dr.  Veblen.  Tunnel  under  his 
great  moraines  and  stalagmites  of  words,  dig  down 
into  his  vast  kitchen-midden  of  discordant  and  rau- 
cous polysyllables,  blow  up  the  hard,  thick  shell  of 
his  almost  theological  manner,  and  what  you  will  find 
in  his  discourse  is  chiefly  a  mass  of  platitudes — the 
self-evident  made  horrifying,  the  obvious  in  terms  of 
the  staggering.  Marx,  I  daresay,  said  a  good  deal  of 
it,  and  what  Marx  overlooked  has  been  said  over  and 
over  again  by  his  heirs  and  assigns.  But  Marx,  at 
this  business,  labored  under  a  technical  handicap:  he 
wrote  in  German,  a  language  he  actually  understood. 
Prof.  Dr.  Veblen  submits  himself  to  no  such  disad- 
vantage. Though  born,  I  believe,  in  These  States, 
and  resident  here  all  his  life,  he  achieves  the  effect, 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  67 

perhaps  without  employing  the  means,  of  thinking  in 
some  unearthly  foreign  language — say  Swahili, 
Sumerian  or  Old  Bulgarian — and  then  painfully 
clawing  his  thoughts  into  a  copious  but  uncertain  and 
book-learned  English.  The  result  is  a  style  that  af- 
fects the  higher  cerebral  centers  like  a  constant  roll 
of  subway  expresses.  The  second  result  is  a  sort  of 
bewildered  numbness  of  the  senses,  as  before  some 
fabulous  and  unearthly  marvel.  And  the  third  re- 
sult, if  I  make  no  mistake,  is  the  celebrity  of  the  pro- 
fessor as  a  Great  Thinker.  In  brief,  he  states  his  hol- 
low nothings  in  such  high,  astounding  terms  that  they 
must  inevitably  arrest  and  blister  the  right-thinking 
mind.  He  makes  them  mysterious.  He  makes  them 
shocking.  He  makes  them  portentous.  And  so, 
flinging  them  at  naive  and  believing  minds,  he  makes 
them  stick  and  burn. 

No  doubt  you  think  that  I  exaggerate — perhaps 
even  that  I  lie.  If  so,  then  consider  this  specimen — 
the  first  paragraph  of  Chapter  XIII  of  "The  Theory 
of  the  Leisure  Class": 

In  an  increasing  proportion  as  time  goes  on,  the  anthro- 
pomorphic cult,  with  its  code  of  devout  observances,  suffers 
a  progressive  disintegration  through  the  stress  of  economic 
exigencies  and  the  decay  of  the  system  of  status.  As  this 
disintegration  proceeds,  there  come  to  be  associated  and 
blended  with  the  devout  attitude  certain  other  motives  and 
impulses  that  are  not  always  of  an  anthropomorphic 
origin,  nor  traceable  to  the  habit  of  personal  subservience. 


68  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Not  all  of  these  subsidiary  impulses  that  blend  with  the 
bait  of  devoutness  in  the  later  devotional  life  are  alto- 
gether congruous  with  the  devout  attitude  or  with  the 
anthropomorphic  apprehension  of  sequence  of  phenomena. 
Their  origin  being  not  the  same,  their  action  upon  the 
scheme  of  devout  life  is  also  not  in  the  same  direction. 
In  many  ways  they  traverse  the  underlying  norm  of  sub- 
servience or  vicarious  life  to  which  the  code  of  devout  ob- 
servances and  the  ecclesiastical  and  sacerdotal  institutions 
are  to  be  traced  as  their  substantial  basis.  Through  the 
presence  of  these  alien  motives  the  social  and  industrial 
regime  of  status  gradually  disintegrates,  and  the  canon  of 
personal  subservience  loses  the  support  derived  from  an 
unbroken  tradition.  Extraneous  habits  and  proclivities 
encroach  upon  the  field  of  action  occupied  by  this  canon, 
and  it  presently  comes  about  that  the  ecclesiastical  and 
sacerdotal  structures  are  partially  converted  to  other  uses, 
in  some  measure  alien  to  the  purposes  of  the  scheme  of  de- 
vout life  as  it  stood  in  the  days  of  the  most  vigorous  and 
characteristic  development  of  the  priesthood. 

Well,  what  have  we  here?  What  does  this  ap- 
palling salvo  of  rhetorical  artillery  signify?  What 
is  the  sweating  professor  trying  to  say?  What  is  his 
Message  now?  Simply  that  in  the  course  of  time, 
the  worship  of  God  is  commonly  corrupted  by  other 
enterprises,  and  that  the  church,  ceasing  to  be  a  mere 
temple  of  adoration,  becomes  the  headquarters  of 
these  other  enterprises.  More  simply  still,  that  men 
sometimes  vary  serving  God  by  serving  other  men, 
which  means,  of  course,  serving  themselves.     This 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  69 

bald  platitude,  which  must  be  obvious  to  any  child 
who  has  ever  been  to  a  church  bazaar  or  a  parish 
house,  is  here  tortured,  worried  and  run  through  roll- 
ers until  it  is  spread  out  to  241  words,  of  which  fully 
200  are  unnecessary.  The  next  paragraph  is  even 
worse.  In  it  the  master  undertakes  to  explain  in 
his  peculiar  dialect  the  meaning  of  "that  non-reverent 
sense  of  aesthetic  congruity  with  the  environment 
which  is  left  as  a  residue  of  the  latter-day  act  of  wor- 
ship after  elimination  of  its  anthropomorphic  con- 
tent." Just  what  does  he  mean  by  this  "non-reverent 
sense  of  aesthetic  congruity"?  I  have  studied  the 
whole  paragraph  for  three  days,  halting  only  for 
prayer  and  sleep,  and  I  have  come  to  certain  conclu- 
sions. I  may  be  wrong,  but  nevertheless  it  is  the  best 
that  I  can  do.  What  I  conclude  is  this:  he  is  trying 
to  say  that  many  people  go  to  church,  not  because 
they  are  afraid  of  the  devil  but  because  they  enjoy 
the  music,  and  like  to  look  at  the  stained  glass,  the 
potted  lilies  and  the  rev.  pastor.  To  get  this  pro- 
found and  highly  original  observation  upon  paper, 
he  wastes,  not  merely  241,  but  more  than  300  words! 
To  say  what  might  be  said  on  a  postage  stamp  he 
takes  more  than  a  page  in  his  book!  .  .  . 

And  so  it  goes,  alas,  alas,  in  all  his  other  volumes 
— a  cent's  worth  of  information  wrapped  in  a  bale  of 
polysyllables.  In  "The  Higher  Learning  in  Amer- 
ica" the  thing  perhaps  reaches  its  damndest  and  worst. 


70  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

It  is  as  if  the  practice  of  that  incredibly  obscure  and 
malodorous  style  were  a  relentless  disease,  a  sort  of 
progressive  intellectual  diabetes,  a  leprosy  of  the 
horse  sense.  Words  are  flung  upon  words  until  all 
recollection  that  there  must  be  a  meaning  in  them,  a 
ground  and  excuse  for  them,  is  lost.  One  wanders 
in  a  labyrinth  of  nouns,  adjectives,  verbs,  pronouns, 
adverbs,  prepositions,  conjunctions  and  participles, 
most  of  them  swollen  and  nearly  all  of  them  unable 
to  walk.  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  worse  English, 
within  the  limits  of  intelligible  grammar.  It  is 
clumsy,  affected,  opaque,  bombastic,  windy,  empty. 
It  is  without  grace  or  distinction  and  it  is  often  with- 
out the  most  elementary  order.  The  learned  pro- 
fessor gets  himself  enmeshed  in  his  gnarled  sen- 
tences like  a  bull  trapped  by  barbed  wire,  and  his 
efforts  to  extricate  himself  are  quite  as  furious  and 
quite  as  spectacular.  He  heaves,  he  leaps,  he  writhes ; 
at  times  he  seems  to  be  at  the  point  of  yelling  for  the 
police.  It  is  a  picture  to  bemuse  the  vulgar  and  to 
give  the  judicious  grief. 

Worse,  there  is  nothing  at  the  bottom  of  all  this 
strident  wind-music — the  ideas  it  is  designed  to  set 
forth  are,  in  the  overwhelming  main,  poor  ideas,  and 
often  they  are  ideas  that  are  almost  idiotic.  One 
never  gets  the  thrill  of  sharp  and  original  thinking, 
dexterously  put  into  phrases.  The  concepts  underly- 
ing, say,   "The  Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class"   are 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  71 

simply  Socialism  and  water;  the  concepts  underlying 
"The  Higher  Learning  in  America"  are  so  childishly 
obvious  that  even  the  poor  drudges  who  write  edi- 
torials for  newspapers  have  often  voiced  them. 
When,  now  and  then,  the  professor  tires  of  this  emis- 
sion of  stale  bosh  and  attempts  flights  of  a  more 
original  character,  he  straightway  comes  tumbling 
down  into  absurdity.  What  the  reader  then  has  to 
struggle  with  is  not  only  intolerably  bad  writing,  but 
also  loose,  flabby,  cocksure  and  preposterous  think- 
ing. .  .  .  Again  I  take  refuge  in  an  example.  It  is 
from  Chapter  IV  of  "The  Theory  of  the  Leisure 
Class."  The  problem  before  the  author  here  has  to 
do  with  the  social  convention  which  frowns  upon  the 
consumption  of  alcohol  by  women — at  least  to  the 
extent  to  which  men  may  consume  it  decorously. 
Well,  then,  what  is  his  explanation  of  this  conven- 
tion?    Here,  in  brief,  is  his  process  of  reasoning: 

1.  The  leisure  class,  which  is  the  predatory  class  of 
feudal  times,  reserves  all  luxuries  for  itself,  and  disap- 
proves their  use  by  members  of  the  lower  classes,  for  this 
use  takes  away  their  charm  by  taking  away  their  exclu- 
sive possession. 

2.  Women  are  chattels  in  the  possession  of  the  leisure 
class,  and  hence  subject  to  the  rules  made  for  inferiors. 
"The  patriarchal  tradition  .  .  .  says  that  the  woman,  be- 
ing a  chattel,  should  consume  only  what  is  necessary  to  her 
sustenance,  except  so  far  as  her  further  consumption  con- 
tributes to  the  comfort  or  the  good  repute  of  her  master." 


72  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

3.  The  consumption  of  alcohol  contributes  nothing  to 
the  comfort  or  good  repute  of  the  woman's  master,  but 
"detracts  sensibly  from  the  comfort  or  pleasure"  of  her 
master.     Ergo,  she  is  forbidden  to  drink. 

This,  I  believe,  is  a  fair  specimen  of  the  Veblenian 
ratiocination.  Observe  it  well,  for  it  is  typical. 
That  is  to  say,  it  starts  off  with  a  gratuitous  and  highly 
dubious  assumption,  proceeds  to  an  equally  dubious 
deduction,  and  then  ends  with  a  platitude  which  begs 
the  whole  question.  What  sound  reason  is  there  for 
believing  that  exclusive  possession  is  the  hall-mark 
of  luxury?  There  is  none  that  I  can  see.  It  may 
be  true  of  a  few  luxuries,  but  it  is  certainly  not  true 
of  the  most  familiar  ones.  Do  I  enjoy  a  decent  bath 
because  I  know  that  John  Smith  cannot  afford  one 
— or  because  I  delight  in  being  clean?  Do  I  admire 
Beethoven's  Fifth  Symphony  because  it  is  incompre- 
hensible to  Congressmen  and  Methodists — or  because 
I  genuinely  love  music?  Do  I  prefer  terrapin  a  la 
Maryland  to  fried  liver  because  plowhands  must  put 
up  with  the  liver — or  because  the  terrapin  is  intrin- 
sically a  more  charming  dose?  Do  I  prefer  kissing 
a  pretty  girl  to  kissing  a  charwoman  because  even  a 
janitor  may  kiss  a  charwoman — or  because  the 
pretty  girl  looks  better,  smells  better  and  kisses  bet- 
ter? Now  and  then,  to  be  sure,  the  idea  of  exclusive 
possession  enters  into  the  concept  of  luxury.  I  may, 
if  I  am  a  bibliophile,  esteem  a  book  because  it  is  "a 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  73 
unique  first  edition.  I  may,  if  I  am  fond,  esteem  a 
woman  because  she  smiles  on  no  one  else.  But  even 
here,  save  in  a  very  small  minority  of  cases,  other  at- 
tractions plainly  enter  into  the  matter.  It  pleases  me 
to  have  a  unique  first  edition,  but  I  wouldn't  care  any- 
thing for  a  unique  first  edition  of  Robert  W.  Chambers 
or  Elinor  Glyn ;  the  author  must  have  my  respect,  the 
book  must  be  intrinsically  valuable,  there  must  be 
much  more  to  it  than  its  mere  uniqueness.  And  if, 
being  fond,  I  glory  in  the  exclusive  smiles  of  a  cer- 
tain Miss or  Mrs.  ,  then  surely  my  satis- 
faction depends  chiefly  upon  the  lady  herself,  and 
not  upon  my  mere  monopoly.  Would  I  delight  in 
the  fidelity  of  the  charwoman?  Would  it  give  me 
any  joy  to  learn  that,  through  a  sense  of  duty  to  me, 
she  had  ceased  to  kiss  the  janitor? 

Confronted  by  such  considerations,  it  seems  to  me 
that  there  is  little  truth  left  in  Prof.  Dr.  Veblen's 
theory  of  conspicuous  consumption  and  conspicuous 
waste — that  what  remains  of  it,  after  it  is  practically 
applied  a  few  times,  is  no  more  than  a  wraith  of 
balderdash.  In  so  far  as  it  is  true  it  is  obvious. 
All  the  professor  accomplishes  with  it  is  to  take  what 
every  one  knows  and  pump  it  up  to  such  proportions 
that  every  one  begins  to  doubt  it.  What  could  be 
plainer  than  his  failure  in  the  case  just  cited?  He 
starts  off  with  a  platitude,  and  ends  in  absurdity. 
No  one  denies,  I  take  it,  that  in  a  clearly  limited  sense, 


74  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

women  occupy  a  place  in  the  world — or,  more  ac- 
curately, aspire  to  a  place  in  the  world — that  is  a 
good  deal  like  that  of  a  chattel.  Marriage,  the  goal 
of  their  only  honest  and  permanent  hopes,  invades 
their  individuality;  a  married  woman  becomes  the 
function  of  another  individuality.  Thus  the  appear- 
ance she  presents  to  the  world  is  often  the  mirror  of 
her  husband's  egoism.  A  rich  man  hangs  his  wife 
with  expensive  clothes  and  jewels  for  the  same  reason, 
among  others,  that  he  adorns  his  own  head  with  a 
plug  hat:  to  notify  everybody  that  he  can  afford  it 
— in  brief,  to  excite  the  envy  of  Socialists.  But  he 
also  does  it,  let  us  hope,  for  another  and  far  better 
and  more  powerful  reason,  to  wit,  that  she  intrigues 
him,  that  he  delights  in  her,  that  he  loves  her — and 
so  wants  to  make  her  gaudy  and  happy.  This  reason 
may  not  appeal  to  Socialist  sociologists.  In  Russia, 
according  to  an  old  scandal  (officially  endorsed  by 
the  British  bureau  for  pulling  Yankee  noses)  the 
Bolsheviki  actually  repudiated  it  as  insane.  Never- 
theless, it  continues  to  appeal  very  forcibly  to  the 
majority  of  normal  husbands  in  the  nations  of  the 
West,  and  I  am  convinced  that  it  is  a  hundred  times 
as  potent  as  any  other  reason.  The  American  hus- 
band, in  particular,  dresses  his  wife  like  a  circus 
horse,  not  primarily  because  he  wants  to  display  his 
wealth  upon  her  person,  but  because  he  is  a  soft  and 
moony  fellow  and  ever  ready  to  yield  to  her  desires, 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  75 

however  preposterous.  If  any  conception  of  her  as 
a  chattel  were  actively  in  him,  even  unconsciously,  he 
would  be  a  good  deal  less  her  slave.  As  it  is,  her 
vicarious  practice  of  conspicuous  waste  commonly 
reaches  such  a  development  that  her  master  himself 
is  forced  into  renunciations — which  brings  Prof.  Dr. 
Veblen's  theory  to  self-destruction. 

His  final  conclusion  is  as  unsound  as  his  premisses. 
All  it  comes  to  is  a  plain  begging  of  the  question. 
Why  does  a  man  forbid  his  wife  to  drink  all  the  alco- 
hol she  can  hold?  Because,  he  says,  it  "detracts 
sensibly  from  his  comfort  or  pleasure."  In  other 
words,  it  detracts  from  his  comfort  and  pleasure  be- 
cause it  detracts  from  his  comfort  and  pleasure. 
Meanwhile,  the  real  answer  is  so  plain  that  even  a 
professor  should  know  it.  A  man  forbids  his  wife 
to  drink  too  much  because,  deep  in  his  secret  ardhives, 
he  has  records  of  the  behavior  of  other  women  who 
drank  too  much,  and  is  eager  to  safeguard  his  wife's 
self-respect  and  his  own  dignity  against  what  he 
knows  to  be  certain  invasion.  In  brief,  it  is  a  com- 
monplace of  observation,  familiar  to  all  males  be- 
yond the  age  of  twenty-one,  that  once  a  woman  is 
drunk  the  rest  is  a  mere  matter  of  time  and  place: 
the  girl  is  already  there.  A  husband,  viewing  this 
prospect,  perhaps  shrinks  from  having  his  chattel 
damaged.  But  let  us  be  soft  enough  to  think  that  he 
may  also  shrink  from  seeing  humiliation,  ridicule  and 


76  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

bitter  regret  inflicted  upon  one  who  is  under  his  pro- 
tection, and  one  whose  dignity  and  happiness  are 
precious  to  him,  and  one  whom  he  regards  with  deep 
and  (I  surely  hope)  lasting  affection.  A  man's 
grandfather  is  surely  not  his  chattel,  even  by  the 
terms  of  the  Veblen  theory,  and  yet  I  am  sure  that  no 
sane  man  would  let  the  old  gentleman  go  beyond  a  dis- 
creet cocktail  or  two  if  a  bout  of  genuine  bibbing  were 
certain  to  be  followed  by  the  complete  destruction  of 
his  dignity,  his  chastity  and  (if  a  Presbyterian)  his 
immortal  soul.  .  .  . 

One  more  example  of  the  Veblenian  logic  and  I 
must  pass  on:  I  have  other  fish  to  fry.  On  page 
135  of  "The  Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class"  he  turns 
his  garish  and  buzzing  search-light  upon  another 
problem  of  the  domestic  hearth,  this  time  a  double 
one.  First,  why  do  we  have  lawns  around  our  coun- 
try houses?  Secondly,  why  don't  we  employ  cows  to 
keep  them  clipped,  instead  of  importing  Italians, 
Croatians  and  blackamoors?  The  first  question  is 
answered  by  an  appeal  to  ethnology:  we  delight  in 
lawns  because  we  are  the  descendants  of  "a  pastoral 
people  inhabiting  a  region  with  a  humid  climate." 
True  enough,  there  is  in  a  well-kept  lawn  "an  element 
of  sensuous  beauty,"  but  that  is  secondary:  the  main 
thing  is  that  our  dolicho-blond  ancestors  had  flocks, 
and  thus  took  a  keen  professional  interest  in  grass. 
(The  Marx  motif!     The  economic  interpretation  of 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  77 

history  in  E  flat.)  But  why  don't  we  keep  flocks? 
Why  do  we  renounce  cows  and  hire  Jugo-Slavs?  Be- 
cause "to  the  average  popular  apprehension  a  herd 
of  cattle  so  pointedly  suggests  thrift  and  usefulness 
that  their  presence  .  .  .  would  be  intolerably  cheap." 
With  the  highest  veneration,  Bosh!  Plowing  through 
a.  bad  book  from  end  to  end,  I  can  find  nothing  sillier 
than  this.  Here,  indeed,  the  whole  "theory  of  con- 
spicuous waste"  is  exposed  for  precisely  what  it  is: 
one  per  cent,  platitude  and  ninety-nine  per  cent,  non- 
sense. Has  the  genial  professor,  pondering  his  great 
problems,  ever  taken  a  walk  in  the  country?  And 
has  he,  in  the  course  of  that  walk,  ever  crossed  a 
pasture  inhabited  by  a  cow  (Bos  taurus)?  And  has 
he,  making  that  crossing,  ever  passed  astern  of  the 
cow  herself?  And  has  he,  thus  passing  astern,  ever 
stepped  carelessly,  and — 

But  this  is  not  a  medical  work,  and  so  I  had  better 
haul  up.  The  cow,  to  me,  symbolizes  the  whole 
speculation  of  this  laborious  and  humorless  peda- 
gogue. From  end  to  end  you  will  find  the  same 
tedious  torturing  of  plain  facts,  the  same  relentless 
piling  up  of  thin  and  over-labored  theory,  the  same 
flatulent  bombast,  the  same  intellectual  strabismus. 
And  always  with  an  air  of  vast  importance,  always  in 
vexed  and  formidable  sentences,  always  in  the  longest 
words  possible,  always  in  the  most  cacophonous  Eng- 
lish that  even  a  professor  ever  wrote.     One  visualizes 


78  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

him  with  his  head  thrown  back,  searching  for  cryptic 
answers  in  the  firmament  and  not  seeing  the  overt 
and  disconcerting  cow,  not  watching  his  step.  One 
sees  him  as  the  pundit  par  excellence,  infinitely  earn- 
est and  diligent,  infinitely  honest  and  patient,  but  also 
infinitely  humorless,  futile  and  hollow.  .  .  . 

So  much,  at  least  for  the  present,  for  this  Prof. 
Dr.  Thorstein  Veblen,  head  Great  Thinker  to  the  par- 
lor radicals,  Socrates  of  the  intellectual  Greenwich 
Village,  chief  star  (at  least  transiently)  of  the  Ameri- 
can Athanceums.  I  am  tempted  to  crowd  in  mention 
of  some  of  his  other  astounding  theories — for  example, 
the  theory  that  the  presence  of  pupils,  the  labor  of 
teaching,  a  concern  with  pedagogy,  is  necessary  to 
the  highest  functioning  of  a  scientific  investigator — 
a  notion  magnificently  supported  by  the  examples  of 
Flexner,  Ehrlich,  Metchnikoff,  Loeb  and  Carrel!  I 
am  tempted,  too,  to  devote  a  thirdly  to  the  astounding 
materialism,  almost  the  downright  hoggishness,  of  his 
whole  system — its  absolute  exclusion  of  everything 
approaching  an  aesthetic  motive.  But  I  must  leave  all 
these  fallacies  and  absurdities  to  your  own  inquiry. 
More  important  than  any  of  them,  more  important  as 
a  phenomenon  than  the  professor  himself  and  all  his 
works,  is  the  gravity  with  which  his  muddled  and 
highly  dubious  ideas  have  been  received.  At  the 
moment,  I  daresay,  he  is  in  decline;  such  Great 
Thinkers  have  a  way  of  going  out  as  quickly  as  they 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  79 

come  in.  But  a  year  or  so  ago  he  dominated  the 
American  scene.  All  the  reviews  were  full  of  his 
ideas.  A  hundred  lesser  sages  reflected  them. 
Every  one  of  intellectual  pretentions  read  his  books. 
Veblenism  was  shining  in  full  brilliance.  There  were 
Veblenists,  Veblen  clubs,  Veblen  remedies  for  all  the 
sorrows  of  the  world.  There  were  even,  in  Chicago, 
Veblen  Girls — perhaps  Gibson  girls  grown  middle- 
aged  and  despairing. 

The  spectacle,  unluckily,  was  not  novel.  Go  back 
through  the  history  of  America  since  the  early  nine- 
ties, and  you  will  find  a  long  succession  of  just  such 
violent  and  uncritical  enthusiasms.  James  had  his 
day;  Dewey  had  his  day;  Ibsen  had  his  day;  Maeter- 
linck had  his  day.  Almost  every  year  sees  another 
intellectual  Munyon  arise,  with  his  infallible  peruna 
for  all  the  current  malaises.  Sometimes  this  Great 
Thinker  is  imported.  Once  he  was  Pastor  Wagner; 
once  he  was  Bergson;  once  he  was  Eucken;  once  he 
was  Tolstoi ;  once  he  was  a  lady,  by  name  Ellen  Key ; 
again  he  was  another  lady,  Signorina  Montessori. 
But  more  often  he  is  of  native  growth,  and  full  of 
the  pervasive  cocksureness  and  superficiality  of  the 
land.  I  do  not  rank  Dr.  Veblen  among  the  worst  of 
these  haruspices,  save  perhaps  as  a  stylist;  I  am  ac- 
tually convinced  that  he  belongs  among  the  best  of 
them.  But  that  best  is  surely  depressing  enough, 
^hat  lies  behind  it  is  the  besetting  intellectual  sin  of 


80  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  United  States — the  habit  of  turning  intellectual 
concepts  into  emotional  concepts,  the  vice  of  orgiastic 
and  inflammatory  thinking.  There  is,  in  America, 
no  orderly  and  thorough  working  out  of  the  funda- 
mental problems  of  our  society;  there  is  only,  as  one 
Englishman  has  said,  an  eternal  combat  of  crazes. 
The  things  of  capital  importance  are  habitually  dis- 
cussed, not  by  men  soberly  trying  to  get  at  the  truth 
about  them,  but  by  brummagem  Great  Thinkers  try- 
ing only  to  get  kudos  out  of  them.  We  are  beset  end- 
lessly by  quacks — and  they  are  not  the  less  quacks 
when  they  happen  to  be  quite  honest.  In  all  fields, 
from  politics  to  pedagogics  and  from  theology  to  pub- 
lic hygiene,  there  is  a  constant  emotional  obscuration 
of  the  true  issues,  a  violent  combat  of  credulities,  an 
inane  debasement  of  scientific  curiosity  to  the  level 
of  mob  gaping. 

The  thing  to  blame,  of  course,  is  our  lack  of  an  in- 
tellectual aristocracy — sound  in  its  information,  skep- 
tical in  its  habit  of  mind,  and,  above  all,  secure  in 
its  position  and  authority.  Every  other  civilized 
country  has  such  an  aristocracy.  It  is  the  natural 
corrective  of  enthusiasms  from  below.  It  is  hos- 
pitable to  ideas,  but  as  adamant  against  crazes.  It 
stands  against  the  pollution  of  logic  by  emotion,  the 
sophistication  of  evidence  to  the  glory  of  God.  But  in 
America  there  is  nothing  of  the  sort.  On  the  one 
hand  there  is  the  populace — perhaps  more  powerful 


PROFESSOR  VEBLEN  81 

here,  more  capable  of  putting  its  idiotic  ideas  into  exe- 
cution, than  anywhere  else — and  surely  more  eager  to 
follow  platitudinous  messiahs.  On  the  other  hand 
there  is  the  ruling  plutocracy — ignorant,  hostile  to 
inquiry,  tyrannical  in  the  exercise  of  its  power,  sus- 
picious of  ideas  of  whatever  sort.  In  the  middle 
ground  there  is  little  save  an  indistinct  herd  of  intel- 
lectual eunuchs,  chiefly  professors — often  quite  as 
stupid  as  the  plutocracy  and  always  in  great  fear  of 
it.  When  it  produces  a  stray  rebel  he  goes  over  to 
the  mob;  there  is  no  place  for  him  within  his  own 
order.  This  feeble  and  vacillating  class,  unorgan- 
ized and  without  authority,  is  responsible  for  what 
passes  as  the  well-informed  opinion  of  the  country — 
for  the  sort  of  opinion  that  one  encounters  in  the  seri- 
ous periodicals — for  what  later  on  leaks  down,  much 
diluted,  into  the  few  newspapers  that  are  not  frankly 
imbecile.  Dr.  Veblen  has  himself  described  it  in 
"The  Higher  Learning  in  America";  he  is  one  of  its 
characteristic  products,  and  he  proves  that  he  is  thor- 
oughly of  it  by  the  timorousness  he  shows  in  that  book. 
It  is,  in  the  main,  only  half-educated.  It  lacks  ex- 
perience of  the  world,  assurance,  the  consciousness  of 
class  solidarity  and  security.  Of  no  definite  position 
in  our  national  life,  exposed  alike  to  the  clamors  of 
the  mob  and  the  discipline  of  the  plutocracy,  it  gets  no 
public  respect  and  is  deficient  in  self-respect.  Thus 
the  better  sort  of  men  are  not  tempted  to  enter  it.     It 


82  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

recruits  only  men  of  feeble  courage,  men  of  small 
originality.  Its  sublimest  flower  is  the  American 
college  president,  well  described  by  Dr.  Veblen — a 
perambulating  sycophant  and  platitudinarian,  a 
gaudy  mendicant  and  bounder,  engaged  all  his  life, 
not  in  the  battle  of  ideas,  the  pursuit  and  dissemina- 
tion of  knowledge,  but  in  the  courting  of  rich  donkeys 
and  the  entertainment  of  mobs.  .  .  . 

Nay,  Veblen  is  not  the  worst.  Veblen  is  almost  the 
best.  The  worst  is — but  I  begin  to  grow  indignant, 
and  indignation,  as  old  Friedrich  used  to  say,  is  for- 
eign to  my  nature. 


VI.    THE   NEW   POETRY 
MOVEMENT 

HE  current  pother  about  poetry,  now  gradu- 
ally subsiding,  seems  to  have  begun  about 
seven  years  ago — say  in  1912.     It  was  dur- 
ing that  year  that  Harriet  Monroe  established  Poetry: 
A  Magazine  of  Verse,  in  Chicago,  and  ever  since  then 
she  has  been  the  mother  superior  of  the  movement. 
Other  leaders  have  occasionally  disputed  her  com- 
mand— the  bombastic  Braithwaite,  with  his  annual 
anthology  of  magazine  verse;  Amy  Lowell,  with  her 
solemn  pronunciamentos  in  the  manner  of  a  Harvard 
professor;  Vachel  Lindsay,  with  his  nebulous  vapor- 
ings  and   chautauqua  posturings;   even   such  cheap 
jacks  as  Alfred  Kreymborg,  out  of  Greenwich  Village. 
But  the  importance  of  Miss  Monroe  grows  more  mani- 
fest as  year  chases  year.     She  was,  to  begin  with, 
clearly  the  pioneer.     Poetry  was  on  the  stands  nearly 
two  years  before  the  first  Braithwaite  anthology,  and 
long  before  Miss  Lowell  had  been  lured  from  her 
earlier  finishing-school  doggerels  by  the  Franco-Brit- 
ish Imagists.     It  antedated,  too,  all  the  other  salient 
documents  of  the  movement — Master's  "Spoon  River 

83 


84  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Anthology,"  Frost's  "North  of  Boston,"  Lindsay's 
"General  William  Booth  Enters  Heaven,"  the  historic 
bulls  of  the  Imagists,  the  frantic  balderdash  of  the 
"Others"  group.  Moreover,  Miss  Monroe  has  always 
managed  to  keep  on  good  terms  with  all  wings  of  the 
heaven-kissed  host,  and  has  thus  managed  to  exert 
a  ponderable  influence  both  to  starboard  and  to  port. 
This,  I  daresay,  is  because  she  is  a  very  intelligent 
woman,  which  fact  is  alone  sufficient  to  give  her  an 
austere  eminence  in  a  movement  so  beset  by 
mountebanks  and  their  dupes.  I  have  read  Poetry 
since  the  first  number,  and  find  it  constantly  entertain- 
ing. It  has  printed  a  great  deal  of  extravagant  stuff, 
and  not  a  little  downright  nonsensical  stuff,  but  in  the 
main  it  has  steered  a  safe  and  intelligible  course, 
with  no  salient  blunders.  No  other  poetry  magazine 
— and  there  have  been  dozens  of  them — has  even  re- 
motely approached  it  in  interest,  or,  for  that  matter, 
in  genuine  hospitality  to  ideas.  Practically  all  of 
the  others  have  been  operated  by  passionate  enthusi- 
asts, often  extremely  ignorant  and  always  narrow  and 
humorless.  But  Miss  Monroe  has  managed  to  retain 
a  certain  judicial  calm  in  the  midst  of  all  the  whoop- 
ing and  clapper-clawing,  and  so  she  has  avoided  run- 
ning amuck,  and  her  magazine  has  printed  the  very 
best  of  the  new  poetry  and  avoided  much  of  the  worst. 
As  I  say,  the  movement  shows  signs  of  having  spent 
its  strength.     The  mere  bulk  of  the  verse  that  it  pro- 


THE  NEW  POETRY  MOVEMENT  85 
duces  is  a  great  deal  less  than  it  was  three  or  four 
years  ago,  or  even  one  or  two  years  ago,  and  there  is 
a  noticeable  tendency  toward  the  conservatism  once 
so  loftily  disdained.  I  daresay  the  Knish-Morgan 
burlesque  of  Witter  Bynner  and  Arthur  Davison  Ficke 
was  a  hard  blow  to  the  more  fantastic  radicals.  At 
all  events,  they  subsided  after  it  was  perpetrated,  and 
for  a  couple  of  years  nothing  has  been  heard  from 
them.  These  radicals,  chiefly  collected  in  what  was 
called  the  "Others"  group,  rattled  the  slapstick  in  a 
sort  of  side-show  to  the  main  exhibition.  They  at- 
tracted, of  course,  all  the  more  credulous  and  unin- 
formed partisans  of  the  movement,  and  not  a  few  ad- 
vanced professors  out  of  one-building  universities  be- 
gan to  lecture  upon  them  before  bucolic  women's 
clubs.  They  committed  hari-kari  in  the  end  by  be- 
ginning to  believe  in  their  own  buncombe.  When 
their  leaders  took  to  the  chautauquas  and  sought  to 
convince  the  peasantry  that  James  Whitcomb  Riley 
was  a  fraud  the  time  was  ripe  for  the  lethal  buffoonery 
of  MM.  Bynner  and  Ficke.  That  buffoonery  was 
enormously  successful — perhaps  the  best  hoax  in 
American  literary  history.  It  was  swallowed,  indeed, 
by  so  many  magnificoes  that  it  made  criticism  very 
timorous  thereafter,  and  so  did  damage  to  not  a  few 
quite  honest  bards.  To-day  a  new  poet,  if  he  de- 
parts ever  so  little  from  the  path  already  beaten,  is 
kept  in  a  sort  of  literary  delousing  pen  until  it  is 


86  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

established  that  he  is  genuinely  sincere,  and  not 
merely  another  Bynner  in  hempen  whiskers  and  a 
cloak  to  go  invisible. 

Well,  what  is  the  net  produce  of  the  whole  uproar? 
How  much  actual  poetry  have  all  these  truculent 
rebels  against  Stedman's  Anthology  and  McGuffey's 
Sixth  Reader  manufactured?  I  suppose  I  have  read 
nearly  all  of  it — a  great  deal  of  it,  as  a  magazine 
editor,  in  manuscript — and  yet,  as  I  look  back,  my 
memory  is  lighted  up  by  very  few  flashes  of  any 
lasting  brilliance.  The  best  of  all  the  lutists  of  the 
new  school,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  are  Carl  Sandburg 
and  James  Oppenheim,  and  particularly  Sandburg. 
He  shows  a  great  deal  of  raucous  crudity,  he  is  often 
a  bit  uncertain  and  wobbly,  and  sometimes  he  is 
downright  banal — but,  taking  one  bard  with  another, 
he  is  probably  the  soundest  and  most  intriguing  of  the 
lot.  Compare,  for  example,  his  war  poems — simple, 
eloquent  and  extraordinarily  moving — to  the  humor- 
less balderdash  of  Amy  Lowell,  or,  to  go  outside  the 
movement,  to  the  childish  gush  of  Joyce  Kilmer,  Her- 
mann Hagedorn  and  Charles  Hanson  Towne.  Often 
he  gets  memorable  effects  by  astonishingly  austere 
means,  as  in  his  famous  "Chicago"  rhapsody  and  his 
"Cool  Tombs."  And  always  he  is  thoroughly  in- 
dividual, a  true  original,  his  own  man.  Oppenheim, 
equally  eloquent,  is  more  conventional.  He  stands, 
as  to  one  leg,  on  the  shoulders  of  Walt  Whitman,  and, 


\ 


THE  NEW  POETRY  MOVEMENT  87 
as  to  the  other,  on  a  stack  of  Old  Testaments.  The 
stuff  he  writes,  despite  his  belief  to  the  contrary,  is 
not  American  at  all;  it  is  absolutely  Jewish,  Levan- 
tine, almost  Asiatic.  But  here  is  something  criticism 
too  often  forgets :  the  Jew,  intrinsically,  is  the  greatest 
of  poets.  Beside  his  gorgeous  rhapsodies  the  high- 
est flights  of  any  western  bard  seem  feeble  and  cere- 
bral. Oppenheim,  inhabiting  a  brick  house  in  New 
York,  manages  to  get  that  sonorous  Eastern  note  into 
his  dithyrambs.  They  are  often  inchoate  and  fever- 
ish, but  at  their  best  they  have  the  gigantic  gusto  of 
Solomon's  Song. 

Miss  Lowell  is  the  schoolmarm  of  the  movement, 
and  vastly  more  the  pedagogue  than  the  artist.  She 
has  written  perhaps  half  a  dozen  excellent  pieces  in 
imitation  of  Richard  Aldington  and  John  Gould 
Fletcher,  and  a  great  deal  of  highfalutin  bathos. 
Her  "A  Dome  of  Many-Colored  Glass"  is  full  of  in- 
fantile poppycock,  and  though  it  is  true  that  it  was 
first  printed  in  1912,  before  she  joined  the  Imagists, 
it  is  not  to  be  forgotten  that  it  was  reprinted  with  her 
consent  in  1915,  after  she  had  definitely  set  up  shop 
as  a  foe  of  the  cliche.  Her  celebrity,  I  fancy,  is 
largely  extra-poetical;  if  she  were  Miss  Tilly  Jones, 
of  Fort  Smith,  Ark.,  there  would  be  a  great  deal  less 
rowing  about  her,  and  her  successive  masterpieces 
would  be  received  less  gravely.  A  literary  crafts- 
man in  America,  as  I  have  already  said  once  or  twice, 


88  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

is  never  judged  by  his  work  alone.  Miss  Lowell  has 
been  helped  very  much  by  her  excellent  social  posi- 
tion. The  majority,  and  perhaps  fully  nine-tenths 
of  the  revolutionary  poets  are  of  no  social  position  at 
all — newspaper  reporters,  Jews,  foreigners  of  vague 
nationality,  school  teachers,  lawyers,  advertisement 
writers,  itinerant  lecturers,  Greenwich  Village  pos- 
turers,  and  so  on.  I  have  a  suspicion  that  it  has 
subtly  flattered  such  denizens  of  the  demi-monde  to 
find  the  sister  of  a  president  of  Harvard  in  their  midst, 
and  that  their  delight  has  materially  corrupted  their 
faculties.  Miss  Lowell's  book  of  exposition,  "Tend- 
encies in  Modern  American  Poetry,"  is  common- 
place to  the  last  degree.  Louis  Untermeyer's  "The 
New  Era  in  American  Poetry"  is  very  much  better. 
And  so  is  Prof.  Dr.  John  Livingston  Lowes'  "Con- 
vention and  Revolt  in  Poetry." 

As  for  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  for  a  short  season  the 
undisputed  Homer  of  the  movement,  I  believe  that  he 
is  already  extinct.  What  made  the  fame  of  "The 
Spoon  River  Anthology"  was  not  chiefly  any  great 
show  of  novelty  in  it,  nor  any  extraordinary  poign- 
ancy, nor  any  grim  truthfulness  unparalleled,  but 
simply  the  public  notion  that  it  was  improper.  It 
fell  upon  the  country  at  the  height  of  the  last  sex 
wave — a  wave  eternally  ebbing  and  flowing,  now  high, 
now  low.  It  was  read,  not  as  work  of  art,  but  as 
document;    its    large    circulation    was    undoubtedly 


THE  NEW  POETRY  MOVEMENT         89 

mainly  among  persons  to  whom  poetry  qua  poetry  was 
as  sour  a  dose  as  symphonic  music.  To  such  persons, 
of  course,  it  seemed  something  new  under  the  sun. 
They  were  unacquainted  with  the  verse  of  George 
Crabbe;  they  were  quite  innocent  of  E.  A.  Robin- 
son and  Robert  Frost;  they  knew  nothing  of  the  Ubi 
sunt  formula;  they  had  never  heard  of  the  Greek 
Anthology.  The  roar  of  his  popular  success  won 
Masters'  case  with  the  critics.  His  undoubted  merits 
in  detail — his  half -wistful  cynicism,  his  capacity  for 
evoking  simple  emotions,  his  deft  skill  at  managing 
the  puny  difficulties  of  vers  libre — were  thereupon 
pumped  up  to  such  an  extent  that  his  defects  were  lost 
sight  of.  Those  defects,  however,  shine  blindingly 
in  his  later  books.  Without  the  advantage  of  content 
that  went  with  the  anthology,  they  reveal  themselves 
as  volumes  of  empty  doggerel,  with  now  and  then  a 
brief  moment  of  illumination.  It  would  be  difficult, 
indeed,  to  find  poetry  that  is,  in  essence,  less  poetical. 
Most  of  the  pieces  are  actually  tracts,  and  many  of 
them  are  very  bad  tracts. 

Lindsay?  Alas,  he  has  done  his  own  burlesque. 
What  was  new  in  him,  at  the  start,  was  an  echo  of 
the  barbaric  rhythms  of  the  Jubilee  Songs.  But  very 
soon  the  thing  ceased  to  be  a  marvel,  and  of  late  his 
elephantine  college  yells  have  ceased  to  be  amusing. 
His  retirement  to  the  chautauquas  is  self-criticism  of 
uncommon   penetration.     Frost?     A   standard   New 


90     PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

England  poet,  with  a  few  changes  in  phraseology,  and 
the  substitution  of  sour  resignationism  for  sweet  resig- 
nationism.  Whittier  without  the  whiskers.  Robin- 
son? Ditto,  but  with  a  politer  bow.  He  has  written 
sound  poetry,  but  not  much  of  it.  The  late  Major- 
General  Roosevelt  ruined  him  by  praising  him,  as  he 
ruined  Henry  Bordeaux,  Pastor  Wagner,  Francis  War- 
rington Dawson  and  many  another.  Giovannitti? 
A  forth-rate  Sandburg.  Ezra  Pound?  The  Ameri- 
can in  headlong  flight  from  America — to  England,  to 
Italy,  to  the  Middle  Ages,  to  ancient  Greece,  to  Cathay 
and  points  East.  Pound,  it  seems  to  me,  is  the  most 
picturesque  man  in  the  whole  movement — a  professor 
turned  fantee,  Abelard  in  grand  opera.  His  knowl- 
edge is  abysmal;  he  has  it  readily  on  tap;  moreover, 
he  has  a  fine  ear,  and  has  written  many  an  excellent 
verse.  But  now  all  the  glow  and  gusto  of  the  bard 
have  been  transformed  into  the  rage  of  the  pam- 
phleteer: he  drops  the  lute  for  the  bayonet.  One 
sympathizes  with  him  in  his  choler.  The  stupidity  he 
combats  is  actually  almost  unbearable.  Every 
normal  man  must  be  tempted,  at  times,  to  spit  on  his 
hands,  hoist  the  black  flag,  and  begin  slitting  throats. 
But  this  business,  alas,  is  fatal  to  the  placid  moods 
and  fine  other-worldliness  of  the  poet.  Pound  gives  a 
thrilling  show,  but — .  .  .  .  The  remaining  stars  of 
the  liberation  need  not  detain  us.  They  are  the  street- 
boys  following  the  calliope.     They  have  labored  with 


THE  NEW  POETRY  MOVEMENT  91 
diligence,  but  they  have  produced  no  poetry.  .  .  . 

Miss  Monroe,  if  she  would  write  a  book  about  it, 
would  be  the  most  competent  historian  of  the  move- 
ment, and  perhaps  also  its  keenest  critic.  She  has 
seen  it  from  the  inside.  She  knows  precisely  what 
it  is  about.  She  is  able,  finally,  to  detach  herself 
from  its  extravagances,  and  to  estimate  its  opponents 
without  bile.  Her  failure  to  do  a  volume  about  it 
leaves  Untermeyer's  "The  New  Era  in  American 
Poetry"  the  best  in  the  field.  Prof.  Dr.  Lowes'  treat- 
ise is  very  much  more  thorough,  but  it  has  the  defect 
of  stopping  with  the  fundamentals — it  has  too  little 
to  say  about  specific  poets.  Untermeyer  discusses 
all  of  them,  and  then  throws  in  a  dozen  or  two  ortho- 
dox bards,  wholly  untouched  by  Bolshevism,  for  good 
measure.  His  criticism  is  often  trenchant  and  always 
very  clear.  He  thinks  he  knows  what  he  thinks  he 
knows,  and  he  states  it  with  the  utmost  address — 
sometimes,  indeed,  as  in  the  case  of  Pound,  with  a 
good  deal  more  address  than  its  essential  accuracy 
deserves.  But  the  messianic  note  that  gets  into  the 
bulls  and  ukases  of  Pound  himself,  the  profound 
solemnity  of  Miss  Lowell,  the  windy  chautauqua-like 
nothings  of  Lindsay,  the  contradictions  of  the  Ima- 
gists,  the  puerilities  of  Kreymborg  et  at — all  these 
things  are  happily  absent.  And  so  it  is  possible  to 
follow  him  amiably  even  when  he  is  palpably  wrong. 

That  is  not  seldom.     At  the  very  start,  for  example, 


92  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

he  permits  himself  a  lot  of  highly  dubious  rumble- 
bumble  about  the  "inherent  Americanism"  and  soar- 
ing democracy  of  the  movement.  "Once,"  he  says, 
"the  most  exclusive  and  aristocratic  of  the  arts,  ap- 
preciated and  fostered  only  by  little  salons  and  eru- 
dite groups,  poetry  has  suddenly  swung  away  from 
its  self-imposed  strictures  and  is  expressing  itself  once 
more  in  terms  of  democracy."  Pondering  exces- 
sively, I  can  think  of  nothing  that  would  be  more  un- 
true than  this.  The  fact  is  that  the  new  poetry  is 
neither  American  nor  democratic.  Despite  its  re- 
mote grounding  on  Whitman,  it  started,  not  in  the 
United  States  at  all,  but  in  France,  and  its  exotic 
color  is  still  its  most  salient  characteristic.  Prac- 
tically every  one  of  its  practitioners  is  palpably  un- 
der some  strong  foreign  influence,  and  most  of  them 
are  no  more  Anglo-Saxon  than  a  samovar  or  a  toccata. 
The  deliberate  strangeness  of  Pound,  his  almost 
fanatical  anti-Americanism,  is  a  mere  accentuation 
of  what  is  in  every  other  member  of  the  fraternity. 
Many  of  them,  like  Frost,  Fletcher,  H.  D.  and  Pound, 
have  exiled  themselves  from  the  republic.  Others, 
such  as  Oppenheim,  Sandburg,  Giovannitti,  Benet  and 
Untermeyer  himself,  are  palpably  Continental  Euro- 
peans, often  with  Levantine  traces.  Yet  others,  such 
as  Miss  Lowell  and  Masters,  are  little  more,  at  their 
best,  than  translators  and  adapters — from  the  French, 
from  the  Japanese,  from  the  Greek.     Even  Lindsay, 


THE  NEW  POETRY  MOVEMENT         93 

superficially  the  most  national  of  them  all,  has  also 
his  exotic  smear,  as  I  have  shown.  Let  Miss  Lowell 
herself  be  a  witness.  "We  shall  see  them,"  she  says 
at  the  opening  of  her  essay  on  E.  A.  Robinson,  "ced- 
ing more  and  more  to  the  influence  of  other,  alien,  peo- 
ples. ..."  A  glance  is  sufficient  to  show  the  cor- 
rectness of  this  observation.  There  is  no  more  "in- 
herent Americanism"  in  the  new  poetry  than  there  is 
in  the  new  American  painting  and  music.  It  lies,  in 
fact,  quite  outside  the  main  stream  of  American 
culture. 

Nor  is  it  democratic,  in  any  intelligible  sense.  The 
poetry  of  Whittier  and  Longfellow  was  democratic. 
It  voiced  the  elemental  emotions  of  the  masses  of  the 
people;  it  was  full  of  their  simple,  rubber-stamp 
ideas;  they  comprehended  it  and  cherished  it.  And 
so  with  the  poetry  of  James  Whitcomb  Riley,  and  with 
that  of  Walt  Mason  and  Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox.  But 
the  new  poetry,  grounded  firmly  upon  novelty  of  form 
and  boldness  of  idea,  is  quite  beyond  their  under- 
standing. It  seems  to  them  to  be  idiotic,  just  as  the 
poetry  of  Whitman  seemed  to  them  to  be  idiotic,  and 
if  they  could  summon  up  enough  interest  in  it  to  ex- 
amine it  at  length  they  would  undoubtedly  clamor  for 
laws  making  the  confection  of  it  a  felony.  The  mis- 
take of  Untermeyer,  and  of  others  who  talk  to  the 
same  effect,  lies  in  confusing  the  beliefs  of  poets  and 
the  subject  matter  of  their  verse  with  its  position  in 


94  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  national  consciousness.  Oppenheim,  Sandburg 
and  Lindsay  are  democrats,  just  as  Whitman  was  a 
democrat,  but  their  poetry  is  no  more  a  democratic 
phenomenon  than  his  was,  or  than,  to  go  to  music, 
Beethoven's  Eroica  Symphony  was.  Many  of  the 
new  poets,  in  truth,  are  ardent  enemies  of  democracy, 
for  example,  Pound.  Only  one  of  them  has  ever 
actually  sought  to  take  his  strophes  to  the  vulgar. 
That  one  is  Lindsay — and  there  is  not  the  slightest 
doubt  that  the  yokels  welcomed  him,  not  because  they 
were  interested  in  his  poetry,  but  because  it  struck 
them  as  an  amazing,  and  perhaps  even  a  fascinatingly 
obscene  thing,  for  a  sane  man  to  go  about  the  country 
on  any  such  bizarre  and  undemocratic  business. 

No  sound  art,  in  fact,  could  possibly  be  democratic. 
Tolstoi  wrote  a  whole  book  to  prove  the  contrary,  and 
only  succeeded  in  making  his  case  absurd.  The  only 
art  that  is  capable  of  reaching  the  Homo  Boobus  is 
art  that  is  already  debased  and  polluted — band  music, 
official  sculpture,  Pears'  Soap  painting,  the  popular 
novel.  What  is  honest  and  worthy  of  praise  in  the 
new  poetry  is  Greek  to  the  general.  And,  despite 
much  nonsense,  it  seems  to  me  that  there  is  no  little 
in  it  that  is  honest  and  worthy  of  praise.  It  has,  for 
one  thing,  made  an  effective  war  upon  the  cliche,  and 
so  purged  the  verse  of  the  nation  of  much  of  its  old 
banality  in  subject  and  phrase.  The  elegant  album 
pieces  of  Richard  Henry  Stoddard  and  Edmund  Clar- 


THE  NEW  POETRY  MOVEMENT  95 
ence  Stedman  are  no  longer  in  fashion — save,  per- 
haps, among  the  democrats  that  Untermeyer  mentions. 
And  in  the  second  place,  it  has  substituted  for  this  an- 
cient conventionality  an  eager  curiosity  in  life  as  men 
and  women  are  actually  living  it — a  spirit  of  daring 
experimentation  that  has  made  poetry  vivid  and  full 
of  human  interest,  as  it  was  in  the  days  of  Elizabeth. 
The  thing  often  passes  into  the  grotesque,  it  is  shot 
through  and  through  with  heliogabalisme,  but  at  its 
high  points  it  has  achieved  invaluable  pioneering.  A 
new  poet,  emerging  out  of  the  Baptist  night  of  Peoria 
or  Little  Rock  to-day,  comes  into  an  atmosphere 
charged  with  subtle  electricities.  There  is  a  stimu- 
lating restlessness;  ideas  have  a  welcome;  the  art  he 
aspires  to  is  no  longer  a  merely  formal  exercise,  like 
practicing  Czerny.  When  a  Henry  Van  Dyke  arises 
at  some  college  banquet  and  begins  to  discharge  an 
old-fashioned  ode  to  alma  mater  there  is  a  definite 
snicker;  it  is  almost  as  if  he  were  to  appear  in  Con- 
gress gaiters  or  a  beaver  hat.  An  audience  for  such 
things,  of  course,  still  exists.  It  is,  no  doubt,  an 
enormously  large  audience.  But  it  has  changed  a 
good  deal  qualitatively,  if  not  quantitatively.  The 
relatively  civilized  reader  has  been  educated  to  some- 
thing better.  He  has  heard  a  music  that  has  spoiled 
his  ear  for  the  old  wheezing  of  the  melodeon.  He 
weeps  no  more  over  what  wrung  him  yesteryear. 
Unluckily,  the  new  movement,  in  America  even 


96  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

more  than  in  England,  France  and  Germany,  suffers 
from  a  very  crippling  lack,  and  that  is  the  lack  of  a 
genuinely    first-rate    poet.     It    has    produced    many 
talents,  but  it  has  yet  to  produce  any  genius,  or  even 
the  shadow  of  genius.     There  has  been  a  general  lift- 
ing of  the  plain,  but  no  vasty  and  melodramatic  throw- 
ing up  of  new  peaks.     Worse  still,  it  has  had  to  face 
hard  competition  from  without — that  is,  from  poets 
who,  while  also  emerged  from  platitude,  have  yet 
stood  outside  it,  and  perhaps  in  some  doubt  of  it. 
Untermeyer  discusses  a  number  of  such  poets  in  his 
book.     There   is   one   of  them,   Lizette   Woodworth 
Reese,   who  has  written   more   sound  poetry,   more 
genuinely  eloquent  and  beautiful  poetry,  than  all  the 
new  poets  put  together — more  than  a  whole  posse  of 
Masterses  and  Lindsays,  more  than  a  hundred  Amy 
Lowells.     And  there  are  others,  Neihardt  and  John 
McClure  among  them — particularly  McClure.     Un- 
termeyer, usually  anything  but  an  ass,  once  commit- 
ted the  unforgettable  asininity  of  sneering  at  McClure. 
The  blunder,  I  daresay,  is  already  lamented ;  it  is  not 
embalmed  in  his  book.     But  it  will  haunt  him  on 
Tyburn    Hill.     For    this    McClure,    attempting    the 
simplest  thing  in  the  simplest  way,  has  done  it  almost 
superbly.     He  seems  to  be  entirely  without  theories. 
There  is  no  pedagogical  passion  in  him.     He  is  no 
reformer.     But  more  than  any  of  the  reformers  now 
or  lately  in  the  arena,  he  is  a  poet. 


VII.    THE   HEIR   OF   MARK   TWAIN 

NOTHING  could  be  stranger  than  the  current 
celebrity  of  Irvin  S.  Cobb,  an  author  of 
whom  almost  as  much  is  heard  as  if  he  were 
a  new  Thackeray  or  Moliere.  One  is  solemnly  told 
by  various  extravagant  partisans,  some  of  them  not 
otherwise  insane,  that  he  is  at  once  the  successor  to 
Mark  Twain  and  the  heir  of  Edgar  Allan  Poe.  One 
hears  of  public  dinners  given  in  devotion  to  his  genius, 
of  public  presentations,  of  learned  degrees  conferred 
upon  him  by  universities,  of  other  extraordinary  adu- 
lations, few  of  them  shared  by  such  relatively  puny 
fellows  as  Howells  and  Dreiser.  His  talents  and  sa- 
gacity pass  into  popular  anecdotes;  he  has  sedulous 
Boswells;  he  begins  to  take  on  the  august  importance 
of  an  actor-manager.  Behind  the  scenes,  of  course, 
a  highly  dexterous  publisher  pulls  the  strings,  but 
much  of  it  is  undoubtedly  more  or  less  sincere;  men 
pledge  their  sacred  honor  to  the  doctrine  that  his  ex- 
istence honors  the  national  literature.  Moreover,  he 
seems  to  take  the  thing  somewhat  seriously  himself. 
He  gives  his  imprimatur  to  various  other  authors,  in- 
cluding Joseph  Conrad;  he  engages  himself  to  lift 

97 


98  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  literary  tone  of  moving-pictures;  he  lends  his 
name  to  movements;  he  exposes  himself  in  the  chau- 
tauquas;  he  takes  on  the  responsibilities  of  a  patriot 
and  a  public  man.  .  .  .  Altogether,  a  curious,  and, 
in  some  of  its  aspects,  a  caressingly  ironical  spectacle. 
One  wonders  what  the  graduate  sophomores  of  to-mor- 
row, composing  their  dull  tomes  upon  American  let- 
ters, will  make  of  it.  .  .  . 

In  the  actual  books  of  the  man  I  can  find  nothing 
that  seems  to  justify  so  much  enthusiasm,  nor  even 
the  hundredth  part  of  it.  His  serious  fiction  shows 
a  certain  undoubted  facility,  but  there  are  at  least 
forty  other  Americans  who  do  the  thing  quite  as  well. 
His  public  bulls  and  ukases  are  no  more  than  clever 
journalism — superficial  and  inconsequential,  first  say- 
ing one  thing  and  then  quite  another  thing.  And  in 
his  humor,  which  his  admirers  apparently  put  first 
among  his  products,  I  can  discover,  at  best,  nothing 
save  a  somewhat  familiar  aptitude  for  grotesque  anec- 
dote, and,  at  worst,  only  the  laborious  laugh-squeez- 
ing of  Bill  Nye.  In  the  volume  called  "Those  Times 
and  These"  there  is  an  excellent  comic  story,  to  wit, 
"Hark,  From  the  Tomb!"  But  it  would  surely  be  an 
imbecility  to  call  it  a  masterpiece;  too  many  other 
authors  have  done  things  quite  as  good;  more  than  a 
few  (I  need  cite  only  George  Ade,  Owen  Johnson  and 
Ring  W.  Lardner)  have  done  things  very  much  better. 
Worse,  it  lies  in  the  book  like  a  slice  of  Smithfield 


THE  HEIR  OF  MARK  TWAIN  99 

ham  between  two  slabs  of  stale  store-bread.  On  both 
sides  of  it  are  very  stupid  artificialities — stories  with- 
out point,  stories  in  which  rustic  characters  try  to  talk 
like  Wilson  Mizner,  stories  altogether  machine-made 
and  depressing.  Turn,  now,  to  another  book,  vastly 
praised  in  its  year — by  name,  "Cobb's  Anatomy." 
One  laughs  occasionally —  but  precisely  as  one  laughs 
over  a  comic  supplement  or  the  jokes  in  Ayers  Al- 
manac.    For  example: 

There  never  was  a  hansom  cab  made  that  would  hold 
a  fat  man  comfortably  unless  he  left  the  doors  open,  and 
that  makes  him  feel  undressed. 

Again: 

Your  hair  gives  you  bother  so  long  as  you  have  it  and 
more  bother  when  it  starts  to  go.  You  are  always  doing 
something  for  it  and  it  is  always  showing  deep-dyed  in- 
gratitude in  return;  or  else  the  dye  isn't  deep  enough, 
which  is  even  worse. 

Exactly;  it  is  even  worse.     And  then  this: 

Once  there  was  a  manicure  lady  who  wouldn't  take  a 
tip,  but  she  is  now  no  more.  Her  indignant  sisters  stabbed 
her  to  death  with  hatpins  and  nail-files. 

I  do  not  think  I  quote  unfairly;  I  have  tried  to  se- 
lect honest  specimens  of  the  author's  fancy.  .  .  . 
Perhaps  it  may  be  well  to  glance  at  another  book.  I 
choose,  at  random,  "Speaking  of  Operations — ,"  a 


100  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

work  described  by  the  publisher  as  "the  funniest  yet 
written  by  Cobb"  and  "the  funniest  book  we  know  of." 
In  this  judgment  many  other  persons  seem  to  have 
concurred.  The  thing  was  an  undoubted  success  when 
it  appeared  as  an  article  in  the  Saturday  Evening  Post 
and  it  sold  thousands  of  copies  between  covers. 
Well,  what  is  in  it?  In  it,  after  a  diligent  reading, 
I  find  half  a  dozen  mildly  clever  observations — and 
sixty  odd  pages  of  ancient  and  infantile  wheezes,  as 
flat  to  the  taste  as  so  many  crystals  of  hyposulphite  of 
soda.  For  example,  the  wheeze  to  the  effect  that  in 
the  days  of  the  author's  nonage  "germs  had  not  been 
invented  yet."  For  example,  the  wheeze  to  the  effect 
that  doctors  bury  their  mistakes.  For  example,  the 
wheeze  to  the  effect  that  the  old-time  doctor  always 
prescribed  medicines  of  abominably  evil  flavor.  .  .  . 
But  let  us  go  into  the  volume  more  in  detail,  and  so 
unearth  all  its  gems. 

On  page  1,  in  the  very  first  paragraph,  there  is  the 
doddering  old  joke  about  the  steepness  of  doctors' 
bills.  In  the  second  paragraph  there  is  the  somewhat 
newer  but  still  fully  adult  joke  about  the  extreme 
willingness  of  persons  who  have  been  butchered  by 
surgeons  to  talk  about  it  afterward.  These  two  wit- 
ticisms are  all  that  I  can  find  on  page  1.  For  the  rest, 
it  consists  almost  entirely  of  a  reference  to  MM.  Bryan 
and  Roosevelt — a  reference  well  known  by  all  news- 
paper paragraphists  and  vaudeville  monologists  to 


THE  HEIR  OF  MARK  TWAIN         101 

be  as  provocative  of  laughter  as  a  mention  of  bunions, 
mothers-in-law  or  Pottstown,  Pa.  On  page  2  Bryan 
and  Roosevelt  are  succeeded  by  certain  heavy  stuff 
in  the  Petroleum  V.  Nasby  manner  upon  the  condi- 
tion of  obstetrics,  pediatrics  and  the  allied  sciences 
among  whales.  Page  3  starts  off  with  the  old  jocosity 
to  the  effect  that  people  talk  too  much  about  the 
weather.  It  progresses  or  resolves,  as  the  musicians 
say,  into  the  wheeze  to  the  effect  that  people  like  to 
dispute  over  what  is  the  best  thing  to  eat  for  break- 
fast. On  page  4  we  come  to  what  musicians  would 
call  the  formal  statement  of  the  main  theme — that 
is,  of  the  how-I-like-to-talk-of-my-operation  motif. 
We  have  thus  covered  four  pages. 

Page  5  starts  out  with  an  enharmonic  change :  to  wit, 
from  the  idea  that  ex-patients  like  to  talk  of  their 
operations  to  the  idea  that  patients  in  being  like  to 
swap  symptoms.  Following  this  there  is  a  repetition 
of  the  gold  theme — that  is,  the  theme  of  the  doctor's 
bill.  On  page  6  there  are  two  chuckles.  One  springs 
out  of  a  reference  to  "light  housekeeping,"  a  phrase 
which  invariably  strikes  an  American  vaudeville  au- 
dience as  salaciously  whimsical.  The  other  is 
grounded  upon  the  well-known  desire  of  baseball  fans 
to  cut  the  umpire's  throat.  On  page  6  there  enters 
for  the  first  time  what  may  be  called  the  second  theme 
of  the  book.  This  is  the  whiskers  motif.  The  whole 
of  this  page,  with  the  exception  of  a  sentence  em- 


102  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

bodying  the  old  wheeze  about  the  happy  times  before 
germs  were  invented,  is  given  over  to  variations  of  the 
whiskers  joke.  Page  8  continues  this  development 
section.  Whiskers  of  various  fantastic  varieties  are 
mentioned — trellis  whiskers,  bosky  whiskers,  ambush 
whiskers,  loose,  luxuriant  whiskers,  landscaped 
whiskers,  whiskers  that  are  winter  quarters  for  patho- 
genic organisms.  Some  hard,  hard  squeezing,  and 
the  humor  in  whiskers  is  temporarily  exhausted. 
Page  8  closes  with  the  old  joke  about  the  cruel  thump- 
ing which  doctors  perform  upon  their  patients'  clav- 
icles. 

Now  for  page  9.  It  opens  with  a  third  statement 
of  the  gold  motif — "He  then  took  my  temperature 
and  $15."  Following  comes  the  dentist's  office  motif 
— that  is,  the  motif  of  reluctance,  of  oozing  courage, 
of  flight.  At  the  bottom  of  the  page  the  gold  motif 
is  repeated  in  the  key  of  E  minor.  Pages  10  and  11 
are  devoted  to  simple  description,  with  very  little  ef- 
fort at  humor.  On  page  12  there  is  a  second  state- 
ment, for  the  full  brass  choir,  of  the  dentist's  office 
motif.  On  page  13  there  are  more  echoes  from  Pe- 
troleum V.  Nasby,  the  subject  this  time  being  a  man 
"who  got  his  spleen  back  from  the  doctor's  and  now 
keeps  it  in  a  bottle  of  alcohol."  On  page  14  one  finds 
the  innocent  bystander  joke;  on  page  15  the  joke  about 
the  terrifying  effects  of  reading  a  patent  medicine 


THE  HEIR  OF  MARK  TWAIN  103 

almanac.  Also,  at  the  bottom  of  the  page,  there  is 
a  third  statement  of  the  dentist's  office  joke.  On  page 
16  it  gives  way  to  a  restatement  of  the  whiskers  theme, 
in  augmentation,  which  in  turn  yields  to  the  third  or 
fifth  restatement  of  the  gold  theme. 

Let  us  now  jump  a  few  pages.  On  page  19  we 
come  to  the  old  joke  about  the  talkative  barber;  on 
page  22  to  the  joke  about  the  book  agent;  on  the  same 
page  to  the  joke  about  the  fashionableness  of  appen- 
dicitis; on  page  23  to  the  joke  about  the  clumsy 
carver  who  projects  the  turkey's  gizzard  into  the  visit- 
ing pastor's  eye;  on  page  28  to  a  restatement  of  the 
barber  joke;  on  page  31  to  another  statement — is  it 
the  fifth  or  sixth? — of  the  dentist's  office  joke;  on 
page  37  to  the  katzenjammer  joke;  on  page  39  to  the 
old  joke  about  doctors  burying  their  mistakes.  .  .  . 
And  so  on.  And  so  on  and  so  on.  And  so  on  and  so 
on  and  so  on.  On  pages  48  and  49  there  is  a  perfect 
riot  of  old  jokes,  including  the  nth  variation  of  the 
whiskers  joke  and  a  fearful  and  wonderful  pun  about 
Belgian  hares  and  heirs.  .  .  . 

On  second  thoughts  I  go  no  further.  .  .  .  This,  re- 
member, is  the  book  that  Cobb's  publishers,  appar- 
ently with  his  own  Nihil  Obstat,  choose  at  his  best. 
This  is  the  official  masterpiece  of  the  "new  Mark 
Twain."  Nevertheless,  even  so  laboriously  flabby  a 
farceur  has  his  moments.     I  turn  to  Frank  J.  Wil- 


104  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

stach's  Dictionary  of  Similes  and  find  this  credited  to 
him:  "No  more  privacy  than  a  goldfish."  Here,  at 
last,  is  something  genuinely  humorous.  Here,  more- 
over, is  something  apparently  new. 


VIII.    HERMANN   SUDERMANN 

THE  fact  that  Sudermann  is  the  author  of  the 
most  successful  play  that  has  come  out  of 
Germany  since  the  collapse  of  the  romantic 
movement  is  the  most  eloquent  of  all  proofs,  perhaps, 
of  his  lack  of  force  and  originality  as  a  dramatist. 
"Heimat,"  Englished,  Frenched  and  Italianized  as 
"Magda,"  gave  a  new  and  gaudy  leading  role  to  all 
the  middle-aged  chewers  of  scenery;  they  fell  upon 
it  as  upon  a  new  Marguerite  Gautier,  and  with  it  they 
coaxed  the  tears  of  all  nations.  That  was  in  the  mid- 
dle nineties.  To-day  the  piece  seems  almost  as  old- 
fashioned  as  "The  Princess  Bonnie,"  and  even  in  Ger- 
many it  has  gone  under  the  counter.  If  it  is  brought 
out  at  all,  it  is  to  adorn  the  death  agonies  of  some 
doddering  star  of  the  last  generation. 

Sudermann  was  one  of  the  first  deer  flushed  by 
Arno  Holz  and  Johannes  Schlaf,  the  founders  of  Ger- 
man naturalism.  He  had  written  a  couple  of  success- 
ful novels,  "Frau  Sorge"  and  "Der  Katzensteg,"  be- 
fore the  UberbrettT  got  on  its  legs,  and  so  he  was  a 
recruit  worth  snaring.  The  initial  fruit  of  his  en- 
listment was  "Die  Ehre,"  a  reductio  ad  absurdum  of 

105 


106  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Prussian  notions  of  honor,  as  incomprehensible  out- 
side of  Germany  as  Franz  Adam  Beyerlein's  "Zapfen- 
streich"  or  Carl  Bleibtreu's  "Die  Edelsten  der  Na- 
tion." Then  followed  "Sodoms  Ende,"  and  after  it, 
"Heimat."  Already  the  emptiness  of  naturalism  was 
beginning  to  oppress  Sudermann,  as  it  was  also  op- 
pressing Hauptmann.  The  latter,  in  1892,  re- 
bounded from  it  to  the  unblushing  romanticism  of 
"Hanneles  Himmelfahrt."  As  for  Sudermann,  he 
chose  to  temper  the  rigors  of  the  Schlaf-Holz  formula 
(by  Ibsen  out  of  Zola)  with  sardoodledum.  The  re- 
sult was  this  "Heimat,"  in  which  naturalism  was 
wedded  to  a  mellow  sentimentality,  caressing  to  au- 
diences bred  upon  the  drama  of  perfumed  adultery. 
The  whole  last  scene  of  the  play,  indeed,  was  no  more 
than  an  echo  of  Augier's  "Le  Mariage  d'  Olympe." 
It  is  no  wonder  that  even  Sarah  Bernhardt  pronounced 
it  a  great  work. 

Since  then  Sudermann  has  wobbled,  and  in  the  novel 
as  well  as  in  the  drama.  Lacking  the  uncanny  versa- 
tility of  Hauptmann,  he  has  been  unable  to  conquer  the 
two  fields  of  romance  and  reality.  Instead  he  has  lost 
himself  between  them,  a  rat  without  a  tail.  "Das  hohe 
Lied,"  his  most  successful  novel  since  "Frau  Sorge," 
is  anything  but  a  first-rate  work.  Its  opening  chapter 
is  a  superlatively  fine  piece  of  writing,  but  after  that 
he  grows  uncertain  of  his  way,  and  toward  the  end 
one  begins  to  wonder  what  it  is  all  about.     No  coher- 


HERMANN  SUDERMANN  107 

ent  idea  is  in  it;  it  is  simply  a  sentimentalization  of 
the  unpleasant;  if  it  were  not  for  the  naughtiness  of 
some  of  the  scenes  no  one  would  read  it.  An  Ameri- 
can dramatist  has  made  a  play  of  it — a  shocker  for 
the  same  clowns  who  were  entranced  by  Brieux's  "Les 
Avaries." 

The  trouble  with  Sudermann,  here  and  elsewhere, 
is  that  he  has  no  sound  underpinnings,  and  is  a  bit  / 
uncertain  about  his  characters  and  his  story.  He 
starts  off  furiously,  let  us  say,  as  a  Zola,  and  then  di- 
lutes Zolaism  with  romance,  and  then  pulls  himself 
up  and  begins  to  imitate  Ibsen,  and  then  trips  and 
falls  headlong  into  the  sugar  bowl  of  sentimentality. 
Lily  Czepanek,  in  "Das  hohe  Lied,"  swoons  at  critical 
moments,  like  the  heroine  of  a  tale  for  chambermaids. 
It  is  almost  as  if  Lord  Jim  should  get  converted  at  a 
gospel  mission,  or  Nora  Helmer  let  down  her  hair. 
.  .  .  But  these  are  defects  in  Sudermann  the  novelist 
and  dramatist,  and  in  that  Sudermann  only.  In  the 
short  story  they  conceal  themselves ;  he  is  done  before 
he  begins  to  vacillate.  In  this  field,  indeed,  all  his 
virtues — of  brisk,  incisive  writing,  of  flashing  obser- 
vation, of  dexterous  stage  management,  of  emotional 
fire  and  address — have  a  chance  to  show  themselves, 
and  without  any  wearing  thin.  The  book  translated 
as  "The  Indian  Lily"  contains  some  of  the  best  short 
stories  that  German — or  any  other  language,  for  that 
matter — can  offer.     They  are  mordant,  succinct  and 


108  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

extraordinarily  vivid  character  studies,  each  full  of 
penetrating  irony  and  sardonic  pity,  each  with  the 
chill  wind  of  disillusion  blowing  through  it,  each 
preaching  that  life  is  a  hideous  farce,  that  good  and 
bad  are  almost  meaningless  words,  that  truth  is  only 
the  lie  that  is  easiest  to  believe.  .  .  . 

It  is  hard  to  choose  between  stories  so  high  in  merit, 
but  surely  "The  Purpose"  is  one  of  the  best.  Of  all 
the  latter-day  Germans,  only  Ludwig  Thoma,  in  "Ein 
bayrischer  Soldat,"  has  ever  got  a  more  brilliant  real- 
ity into  a  crowded  space.  Here,  in  less  than  fifteen 
thousand  words,  Sudermann  rehearses  the  tragedy  of 
a  whole  life,  and  so  great  is  the  art  of  the  thing  that 
one  gets  a  sense  of  perfect  completeness,  almost  of 
exhaustiveness.  .  .  .  Antonie  Wiesner,  the  daughter 
of  a  country  innkeeper,  falls  in  love  with  Robert 
Messerschmidt,  a  medical  student,  and  they  sin  the 
scarlet  sin.  To  Robert,  perhaps,  the  thing  is  a  mere 
interlude  of  midsummer,  but  to  Toni  it  is  all  life's 
meaning  and  glory.  Robert  is  poor  and  his  degree  is 
still  two  years  ahead;  it  is  out  of  the  question  for  him 
to  marry.  Very  well,  Toni  will  find  a  father  for  her 
child;  she  is  her  lover's  property,  and  that  property 
must  be  protected.  And  she  will  wait  willingly,  care- 
less of  the  years,  for  the  distant  day  of  triumph  and 
redemption.  All  other  ideas  and  ideals  drop  out  of 
her  mind;  she  becomes  an  automaton  moved  by  the 
one  impulse,   the  one  yearning.     She   marries  one 


HERMANN  SUDERMANN  109 

Wiegand,  a  decayed  innkeeper;  he,  poor  fool,  ac- 
cepts the  parentage  of  her  child.  Her  father,  rich 
and  unsuspicious,  buys  them  a  likely  inn;  they  begin 
to  make  money.  And  then  begins  the  second  chapter 
of  Toni's  sacrifice.  She  robs  her  husband  systemati- 
cally and  steadily;  she  takes  commissions  on  all  his 
goods;  she  becomes  the  houri  of  his  bar,  that  trade 
may  grow  and  pickings  increase.  Mark  by  mark,  the 
money  goes  to  Robert.  It  sees  him  through  the  uni- 
versity; it  gives  him  his  year  or  two  in  the  hospitals; 
it  buys  him  a  practice;  it  feeds  and  clothes  him,  and 
his  mother  with  him.  The  months  and  years  pass 
endlessly — a  young  doctor's  progress  is  slow.  But 
finally  the  great  day  approaches.  Soon  Robert  will 
be  ready  for  his  wife.  But  Wiegand — what  of  him? 
Toni  thinks  of  half  a  dozen  plans.  The  notion  of 
poisoning  him  gradually  formulates  itself.  Not  a 
touch  of  horror  stays  her.  She  is,  by  this  time,  be- 
yond all  the  common  moralities — a  monomaniac  with 
no  thought  for  anything  save  her  great  purpose.  But 
an  accident  saves  Wiegand.  Toni,  too  elaborate  in 
her  plans,  poisons  herself  by  mischance,  and  comes 
near  dying.  Very  well,  if  not  poison,  then  some  more 
subtle  craft.  She  puts  a  barmaid  into  Wiegand's 
path;  she  manages  the  whole  affair;  before  long  she 
sees  her  victim  safely  enmeshed.  A  divorce  follows; 
the  inn  is  sold ;  her  father's  death  makes  her  suddenly 
rich — at  last  she  is  off  to  greet  her  lord! 


110  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

That  meeting!  .  .  .  Toni  waits  in  the  little  flat 
that  she  has  rented  in  the  city — she  and  her  child,  the 
child  of  Robert.  Robert  is  to  come  at  noon;  as  the 
slow  moments  pass  the  burden  of  her  happiness  seems 
too  great  to  bear.  And  then  suddenly  the  ecstatic 
climax — the  ring  at  the  door.  .  .  .  "A  gentleman 
entered.  A  strange  gentleman.  Wholly  strange. 
Had  she  met  him  on  the  street  she  would  not  have 
known  him.  He  had  grown  old — forty,  fifty,  a  hun- 
dred years.  Yet  his  real  age  could  not  be  over 
twenty-eight!  .  .  .  He  had  grown  fat.  He  carried  a 
little  paunch  around  with  him,  round  and  comfort- 
able. And  the  honorable  scars  gleamed  in  round, 
red  cheeks.  His  eyes  seemed  small  and  receding. 
.  .  .  And  when  he  said:  'Here  I  am  at  last,'  it  was 
no  longer  the  old  voice,  clear  and  a  little  resonant, 
which  had  echoed  and  reechoed  in  her  spiritual  ear. 
He  gurgled  as  though  he  had  swallowed  dumplings." 
An  oaf  without  and  an  oaf  within!  Toni  is  for 
splendors,  triumphs,  the  life;  Robert  has  "settled 
down."  His  remote  village,  hard  by  the  Russian 
border,  is  to  his  liking;  he  has  made  comfortable 
friends  there;  he  is  building  up  a  practice.  He  is, 
of  course,  a  man  of  honor.  He  will  marry  Toni — 
willingly  and  with  gratitude,  even  with  genuine  affec- 
tion. Going  further,  he  will  pay  back  to  her  every 
cent  that  ever  came  from  Wiegand's  till.  He  has 
kept  a  strict  account.     Here  it  is,  in  a  little  blue  note- 


HERMANN  SUDERMANN  111 

book — seven  years  of  entries.  As  he  reads  them 
aloud  the  events  of  those  seven  years  unroll  them- 
selves before  Toni  and  every  mark  brings  up  its 
picture — stolen  cash  and  trinkets,  savings  in  railroad 
fares  and  food,  commissions  upon  furniture  and 
wines,  profits  of  champagne  debauches  with  the  county 
councilor,  sharp  trading  in  milk  and  eggs,  "suspense 
and  longing,  an  inextricable  web  of  falsification  and 
trickery,  of  terror  and  lying  without  end.  The 
memory  of  no  guilt  is  spared  her."  Robert  is  an 
honest,  an  honorable  man.  He  has  kept  a  strict  ac- 
count; the  money  is  waiting  in  bank.  What  is  more, 
he  will  make  all  necessary  confessions.  He  has  not, 
perhaps,  kept  to  the  letter  of  fidelity.  There  was  a 
waitress  in  Berlin;  there  was  a  nurse  at  the  surgical 
clinic;  there  is  even  now  a  Lithuanian  servant  girl 
at  his  bachelor  quarters.  The  last  named,  of  course, 
will  be  sent  away  forthwith.  Robert  is  a  man  of 
honor,  a  man  sensitive  to  every  requirement  of  the 
punctilio,  a  gentleman.  He  will  order  the  announce- 
ment cards,  consult  a  clergyman — and  not  forget  to  get 
rid  of  the  Lithuanian  and  air  the  house.  .  .  .  Poor 
Toni  stares  at  him  as  he  departs.  "Will  he  come  back 
soon?"  asks  the  child.  "I  scarcely  think  so,"  she 
answers.  .  .  .  "That  night  she  broke  the  purpose  of 
her  life,  the  purpose  that  had  become  interwoven  with 
a  thousand  others,  and  when  the  morning  came  she 
wrote  a  letter  of  farewell  to  the  beloved  of  her  youth." 


112  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

A  short  story  of  rare  and  excellent  quality.  A  short 
story — oh,  miracle! — worth  reading  twice.  It  is  not 
so  much  that  its  motive  is  new — that  motive,  indeed, 
has  appeared  in  fiction  many  times,  though  usually 
with  the  man  as  the  protagonist — as  that  its  workman- 
ship is  superb.  Sudermann  here  shows  that,  for  all 
his  failings  elsewhere,  he  knows  superlatively  how  to 
write.  His  act  divisions  are  exactly  right;  his  scenes 
a  faire  are  magnificently  managed;  he  has  got  into  the 
thing  that  rhythmic  ebb  and  flow  of  emotion  which 
makes  for  great  drama.  And  in  most  of  the 
other  stories  in  this  book  you  will  find  much 
the  same  skill.  No  other,  perhaps,  is  quite  so 
good  as  "The  Purpose,"  but  at  least  one  of 
them,  "The  Song  of  Death,"  is  not  far  behind. 
Here  we  have  the  tragedy  of  a  woman  brought 
up  rigorously,  puritanically,  stupidly,  who  dis- 
covers, just  as  it  is  too  late,  that  love  may  be  a  wild 
dance,  an  ecstasy,  an  orgy.  I  can  imagine  no  more 
grotesquely  pathetic  scene  than  that  which  shows  this 
drab  preacher's  wife  watching  by  her  husband's  death- 
bed— while  through  the  door  comes  the  sound  of 
amorous  delirium  from  the  next  room.  And  then 
there  is  a  strangely  moving  Christmas  story,  "Merry 
Folk" — pathos  with  the  hard  iron  in  it.  And  there 
are  "Autumn"  and  "The  Indian  Lily,"  elegies  to  lost 
youth — the  first  of  them  almost  a  fit  complement  to 
Joseph  Conrad's  great  paean  to  youth  triumphant. 


HERMANN  SUDERMANN  113 

Altogether,  a  collection  of  short  stories  of  the  very 
first  rank.  Write  off  "Das  hohe  Lied,"  "Frau  Sorge" 
and  all  the  plays:  a  Sudermann  remains  who  must 
be  put  in  a  high  and  honorable  place,  and  will  be  re- 
membered. 


IX.    GEORGE    ADE 

WHEN,  after  the  Japs  and  their  vassals 
conquer  us  and  put  us  to  the  sword, 
and  the  republic  descends  into  hell, 
some  literary  don  of  Oxford  or  Mittel-Europa  pro- 
ceeds to  the  predestined  autopsy  upon  our  Complete 
Works,  one  of  the  things  he  will  surely  notice,  re- 
viewing our  literary  history,  is  the  curious  persistence 
with  which  the  dons  native  to  the  land  have  overlooked 
its  emerging  men  of  letters.  I  mean,  of  course,  its 
genuine  men  of  letters,  its  salient  and  truly  original 
men,  its  men  of  intrinsic  and  unmistakable  distinc- 
tion. The  fourth-raters  have  fared  well  enough,  God 
knows.  Go  back  to  any  standard  literature  book  of 
ten,  or  twenty,  or  thirty,  or  fifty  years  ago,  and  you 
will  be  amazed  by  its  praise  of  shoddy  mediocrities, 
long  since  fly-blown  and  forgotten.  George  William 
Curtis,  now  seldom  heard  of  at  all,  save  perhaps  in 
the  reminiscences  of  senile  publishers,  was  treated 
in  his  day  with  all  the  deference  due  to  a  prince  of 
the  blood.  Artemus  Ward,  Petroleum  V.  Nasby  and 
half  a  dozen  other  such  hollow  buffoons  were  ranked 
with  Mark  Twain,  and  even  above  him.     Frank  R. 

114 


GEORGE  ADE  115 

Stockton,  for  thirty  years,  was  the  delight  of  all  right- 
thinking  reviewers.  Richard  Henry  Stoddard  and 
Edmund  Clarence  Stedman  were  eminent  personages, 
both  as  critics  and  as  poets.  And  Donald  G.  Mitchell, 
to  make  an  end  of  dull  names,  bulked  so  grandly  in 
the  academic  eye  that  he  was  snatched  from  his  tear- 
jugs  and  his  tea-pots  to  become  a  charter  member  of 
the  National  Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters,  and  actually 
died  a  member  of  the  American  Academy! 

Meanwhile,  three  of  the  five  indubitably  first-rate 
artists  that  America  has  produced  went  quite  without 
orthodox  recognition  at  home  until  either  foreign  en- 
thusiasm or  domestic  clamor  from  below  forced  them 
into  a  belated  and  grudging  sort  of  notice.  I  need 
not  say  that  I  allude  to  Poe,  Whitman  and  Mark 
Twain.  If  it  ever  occurred  to  any  American  critic 
of  position,  during  Poe's  lifetime,  that  he  was  a 
greater  man  than  either  Cooper  or  Irving,  then  I  have 
been  unable  to  find  any  trace  of  the  fact  in  the  criti- 
cal literature  of  the  time.  The  truth  is  that  he  was 
looked  upon  as  a  facile  and  somewhat  dubious  jour- 
nalist, too  cocksure  by  half,  and  not  a  man  to  be  en- 
couraged. Lowell  praised  him  in  1845  and  at  the 
same  time  denounced  the  current  over-praise  of  lesser 
men,  but  later  on  this  encomium  was  diluted  with  very 
important  reservations,  and  there  the  matter  stood 
until  Baudelaire  discovered  the  poet  end  his  belated 
fame  came  winging  home.     Whitman,  as  every  one 


116  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

knows,  fared  even  worse.     Emerson  first  hailed  him 
and  then  turned  tail  upon  him,  eager  to  avoid  any 
share  in  his  ill-repute  among  blockheads.     No  other 
critic  of  any  influence  gave  him  help.     He  was  car- 
ried through  his  dark  days  of  poverty  and  persecu- 
tion by  a  few  private  enthusiasts,  none  of  them  with 
the  ear  of  the  public,  and  in  the  end  it  was  Frenchmen 
and  Englishmen  who  lifted  him  into  the  light.     Imag- 
ine a  Harvard  professor  lecturing  upon  him  in  1865! 
As  for  Mark  Twain,  the  story  of  his  first  fifteen  years 
has  been  admirably  told  by  Prof.  Dr.  William  Lyon 
Phelps,  of  Yale.     The  dons  were  unanimously  against 
him.     Some  sneered  at  him  as  a  feeble  mountebank; 
others  refused  to  discuss  him  at  all;  not  one  harbored 
the  slightest  suspicion  that  he  was  a  man  of  genius, 
or  even  one  leg  of  a  man  of  genius.     Phelps  makes 
merry  over  this  academic  attempt  to  dispose  of  Mark 
by  putting  him  into  Coventry — and  himself  joins  the 
sanctimonious  brethren  who  essay  the  same  enterprise 
against  Dreiser.  .  .  . 

I  come  by  this  route  to  George  Ade — who  perhaps 
fails  to  fit  into  the  argument  doubly,  for  on  the  one 
hand  he  is  certainly  not  a  literary  artist  of  the  first 
rank,  and  on  the  other  hand  he  has  long  enjoyed  a 
meed  of  appreciation  and  even  of  honor,  for  the  Na- 
tional Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters  elevated  him  to 
its  gilt-edged  purple  in  its  first  days,  and  he  is  still  on 
its  roll  of  men  of  "notable  achievement  in  art,  music 


GEORGE  ABE  117 

or  literature,"  along  with  Robert  W.  Chambers,  Henry 
Sydnor  Harrison,  Oliver  Herford,  E.  S.  Martin  and 
E.  W.  Townsend,  author  of  "Chimmie  Fadden." 
Nevertheless,  he  does  not  fall  too  far  outside,  after 
all,  for  if  he  is  not  of  the  first  rank  then  he  surely  de- 
serves a  respectable  place  in  the  second  rank,  and  if 
the  National  Institute  broke  the  spell  by  admitting 
him  then  it  was  probably  on  the  theory  that  he  was  a 
second  Chambers  or  Herford,  or  maybe  even  a  sec- 
ond Martin  or  Townsend.  As  for  the  text-book  dons, 
they  hold  resolutely  to  the  doctrine  that  he  scarcely 
exists,  and  is  not  worth  noticing  at  all.  For  example, 
there  is  Prof.  Fred  Lewis  Pattee,  author  of  "A  His- 
tory of  American  Literature  Since  1870."  Prof. 
Pattee  notices  Chambers,  Marion  Harland,  Herford, 
Townsend,  Amelie  Rives,  R.  K.  Munkittrick  and  many 
other  such  ornaments  of  the  national  letters,  and  even 
has  polite  bows  for  Gelett  Burgess,  Carolyn  Wells 
and  John  Kendrick  Bangs,  but  the  name  of  Ade  is 
missing  from  his  index,  as  is  that  of  Dreiser.  So 
with  the  other  pedagogues.  They  are  unanimously 
shy  of  Ade  in  their  horn-books  for  sophomores,  and 
they  are  gingery  in  their  praise  of  him  in  their  in- 
numerable review  articles.  He  is  commended,  when 
at  all,  much  as  the  late  Joseph  Jefferson  used  to  be 
commended — that  is,  to  the  accompaniment  of  re- 
minders that  even  a  clown  is  one  of  God's  creatures, 
and  may  have  the  heart  of  a  Christian  under  his 


118  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

motley.  The  most  laudatory  thing  ever  said  of  him 
by  any  critic  of  the  apostolic  succession,  so  far  as  I 
can  discover,  is  that  he  is  clean — that  he  does  not 
import  the  lewd  buffooneries  of  the  barroom,  the 
smoking-car  and  the  wedding  reception  into  his 
books.  .  .  . 

But  what  are  the  facts?  The  facts  are  that  Ade  is 
one  of  the  few  genuinely  original  literary  craftsmen 
now  in  practice  among  us;  that  he  comes  nearer  to 
making  literature,  when  he  has  full  steam  up,  than 
any  save  a  scant  half-dozen  of  our  current  novelists, 
and  that  the  whole  body  of  his  work,  both  in  books 
and  for  the  stage,  is  as  thoroughly  American,  in  cut 
and  color,  in  tang  and  savor,  in  structure  and  point  of 
view,  as  the  work  of  Howells,  E.  W.  Howe  or  Mark 
Twain.  No  single  American  novel  that  I  can  think 
of  shows  half  the  sense  of  nationality,  the  keen  feel- 
ing for  national  prejudice  and  peculiarity,  the  sharp 
and  pervasive  Americanism  of  such  Adean  fables  as 
"The  Good  Fairy  of  the  Eighth  Ward  and  the  Dollar 
Excursion  of  the  Steam-Fitters,"  "The  Mandolin 
Players  and  the  Willing  Performer,"  and  "The  Adult 
Girl  Who  Got  Busy  Before  They  Could  Ring  the  Bell 
on  Her."  Here,  amid  a  humor  so  grotesque  that  it 
almost  tortures  the  midriff,  there  is  a  startlingly  vivid 
and  accurate  evocation  of  the  American  scene.  Here, 
under  all  the  labored  extravagance,  there  are  brilliant 
flashlight  pictures  of  the  American  people,  and  Ameri- 


GEORGE  ADE  119 

can  ways  of  thinking,  and  the  whole  of  American 
Kultur.  Here  the  veritable  Americano  stands  forth, 
lacking  not  a  waggery,  a  superstition,  a  snuffle  or  a 
wen. 

Ade  himself,  for  all  his  story-teller's  pretense  of 
remoteness,  is  as  absolutely  American  as  any  of  his  V* 
prairie-town  traders  and  pushers,  Shylocks  and  Dog- 
berries, beaux  and  belles.  No  other  writer  of  our 
generation,  save  perhaps  Howe,  is  more  unescapably 
national  in  his  every  gesture  and  trick  of  mind.  He 
is  as  American  as  buckwheat  cakes,  or  the  Knights  of 
Pythias,  or  the  chautauqua,  or  Billy  Sunday,  or  a 
bull  by  Dr.  Wilson.  He  fairly  reeks  of  the  national 
Philistinism,  the  national  respect  for  respectability, 
the  national  distrust  of  ideas.  He  is  a  marcher,  one 
fancies,  in  parades;  he  joins  movements,  and  move- 
ments against  movements ;  he  knows  no  language  save 
his  own ;  he  regards  a  Roosevelt  quite  seriously  and  a 
Mozart  or  an  Ibsen  as  a  joke;  one  would  not  be  sur- 
prised to  hear  that,  until  he  went  off  to  his  fresh-water 
college,  he  slept  in  his  underwear  and  read  the  Ep- 
worth  Herald.  But,  like  Dreiser,  he  is  a  peasant 
touched  by  the  divine  fire;  somehow,  a  great  instinc- 
tive artist  got  himself  born  out  there  on  that  lush 
Indiana  farm.  He  has  the  rare  faculty  of  seeing  ac- 
curately, even  when  the  thing  seen  is  directly  under 
his  nose,  and  he  has  the  still  rarer  faculty  of  recording 
vividly,  of  making  the  thing  seen  move  with  life. 


120  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

One  often  doubts  a  character  in  a  novel,  even  in  a 
good  novel,  but  who  ever  doubted  Gus  in  "The  Two 
Mandolin  Players,"  or  Mae  in  "Sister  Mae,"  or,  to 
pass  from  the  fables,  Payson  in  "Mr.  Payson's  Satiri- 
cal Christmas"?  Here,  with  strokes  so  crude  and 
obvious  that  they  seem  to  be  laid  on  with  a  broom, 
Ade  achieves  what  0.  Henry,  with  all  his  ingenuity, 
always  failed  to  achieve:  he  fills  his  bizarre  tales  with 
human  beings.  There  is  never  any  artfulness  on  the 
surface.  The  tale  itself  is  never  novel,  or  complex; 
it  never  surprises;  often  it  is  downright  banal.  But 
underneath  there  is  an  artfulness  infinitely  well 
wrought,  and  that  is  the  artfulness  of  a  story-teller 
who  dredges  his  story  out  of  his  people,  swiftly  and 
skillfully,  and  does  not  squeeze  his  people  into  his 
story,  laboriously  and  unconvincingly. 

Needless  to  say,  a  moralist  stands  behind  the  co- 
median. He  would  teach;  he  even  grows  indignant. 
Roaring  like  a  yokel  at  a  burlesque  show  over  such 
wild  and  light-hearted  jocosities  as  "Paducah's  Favor- 
ite Comedians"  and  "Why  'Gondola'  Was  Put  Away," 
one  turns  with  something  of  a  start  to  such  things  as 
"Little  Lutie,"  "The  Honest  Money  Maker"  and  "The 
Corporation  Director  and  the  Mislaid  Ambition." 
Up  to  a  certain  point  it  is  all  laughter,  but  after  that 
there  is  a  flash  of  the  knife,  a  show  of  teeth.  Here 
a  national  limitation  often  closes  in  upon  the  satirist. 
He  cannot  quite  separate  the  unaccustomed  from  the 


GEORGE  ADE  121 

abominable;  he  is  unable  to  avoid  rattling  his  Philis- 
tine trappings  a  bit  proudly;  he  must  prove  that  he, 
too,  is  a  right-thinking  American,  a  solid  citizen  and 
a  patriot,  unshaken  in  his  lofty  rectitude  by  such 
poisons  as  aristocracy,  adultery,  hors  d'ceuvres  and 
the  sonata  form.  But  in  other  directions  this  thor- 
ough-going nationalism  helps  him  rather  than  hinders 
him.  It  enables  him,  for  one  thing,  to  see  into  sen- 
timentality, and  to  comprehend  it  and  project  it  accu- 
rately. I  know  of  no  book  which  displays  the  mooni- 
ness  of  youth  with  more  feeling  and  sympathy  than 
"Artie,"  save  it  be  Frank  Norris'  forgotten  "Blix." 
In  such  fields  Ade  achieves  a  success  that  is  rare  and 
indubitable.  He  makes  the  thing  charming  and  he 
makes  it  plain. 

But  all  these  fables  and  other  compositions  of  his 
are  mere  sketches,  inconsiderable  trifles,  impromptus 
in  bad  English,  easy  to  write  and  of  no  importance! 
Are  they,  indeed?  Do  not  believe  it  for  a  moment. 
Fifteen  or  twenty  years  ago,  when  Ade  was  at  the 
height  of  his  celebrity  as  a  newspaper  Sganarelle, 
scores  of  hack  comedians  tried  to  imitate  him — and 
all  failed.  I  myself  was  of  the  number.  I  operated 
a  so-called  funny  column  in  a  daily  newspaper,  and 
like  my  colleagues  near  and  far,  I  essayed  to  manufac- 
ture fables  in  slang.  What  miserable  botches  they 
were!  How  easy  it  was  to  imitate  Ade's  manner — 
and  how  impossible  to  imitate  his  matter!     No;  please 


122  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

don't  get  the  notion  that  it  is  a  simple  thing  to  write 
such  a  fable  as  that  of  "The  All-Night  Seance  and  the 
Limit  That  Ceased  to  Be,"  or  that  of  "The  Preacher 
Who  Flew  His  Kite,  But  Not  Because  He  Wished  to  Do 
So,"  or  that  of  "The  Roystering  Blades."     Far  from 
it!     On  the  contrary,  the  only  way  you  will  ever 
accomplish  the  feat  will  be  by  first  getting  Ade's  firm 
grasp  upon  American  character,  and  his  ability  to 
think  out  a  straightforward,  simple,  amusing  story, 
and  his  alert  feeling  for  contrast  and  climax,  and  his 
extraordinary  talent  for  devising  novel,  vivid  and  un- 
forgettable phrases.     Those  phrases  of  his  sometimes 
wear  the  external  vestments  of  a  passing  slang,  but 
they  are  no  more  commonplace  and  vulgar  at  bottom 
than  Gray's  "mute,  inglorious  Milton"  or  the  "some- 
wheres  East  of  Suez"  of  Kipling.     They  reduce  an 
idea  to  a  few  pregnant  syllables.     They  give  the  at- 
tention a  fillip  and  light  up  a  whole  scene  in  a  flash. 
They  are  the  running  evidences  of  an  eye  that  sees 
clearly  and  of  a  mind  that  thinks  shrewdly.     They 
give  distinction  to  the  work  of  a  man  who  has  so  well 
concealed  a  highly  complex  and  efficient  artistry  that 
few  have  ever  noticed  it. 


X.    THE    BUTTE   BASHKIRTSEFF 

OF  all  the  pseudo-rebels  who  have  raised  a 
tarletan  black  flag  in  These  States,  surely 
Mary  MacLane  is  one  of  the  most  pathetic. 
When,  at  nineteen,  she  fluttered  Vassar  with  "The 
Story  of  Mary  MacLane,"  the  truth  about  her  was  still 
left  somewhat  obscure ;  the  charm  of  her  flapperhood, 
so  to  speak,  distracted  attention  from  it,  and  so  con- 
cealed it.  But  when,  at  thirty-five,  she  achieved  "I, 
Mary  MacLane,"  it  emerged  crystal-clear;  she  had 
learned  to  describe  her  malady  accurately,  though 
she  still  wondered,  a  bit  wistfully,  just  what  it  was. 
And  that  malady?  That  truth?  Simply  that  a 
Scotch  Presbyterian  with  a  soaring  soul  is  as  cruelly 
beset  as  a  wolf  with  fleas,  a  zebra  with  the  botts.  Let 
a  spark  of  the  divine  fire  spring  to  life  in  that  arid 
corpse,  and  it  must  fight  its  way  to  flame  through  a 
drum  fire  of  wet  sponges.  A  humming  bird  im- 
mersed in  Kartoffelsuppe.  Walter  Pater  writing  for 
the  London  Daily  Mail.  Lucullus  traveling  steerage. 
...  A  Puritan  wooed  and  tortured  by  the  leers 
of  beauty,  Mary  MacLane  in  a  moral  republic,  in  a 
Presbyterian  diocese,  in  Butte.  .  .  . 

123 


124  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

I  hope  my  figures  of  speech  are  not  too  abstruse. 
What  I  mean  to  say  is  simply  this:  that  the  secret  of 
Mary  MacLane  is  simply  this:  that  the  origin  of  all 
her  inchoate  naughtiness  is  simply  this:  that  she  is  a 
Puritan  who  has  heard  the  call  of  joy  and  is  strug- 
gling against  it  damnably.  Remember  so  much,  and 
the  whole  of  her  wistful  heresy  becomes  intelligible. 
On  the  one  hand  the  loveliness  of  the  world  enchants 
her;  on  the  other  hand  the  fires  of  hell  warn  her. 
This  tortuous  conflict  accounts  for  her  whole  bag  of 
tricks ;  her  timorous  flirtations  with  the  devil,  her  occa- 
sional outbreaks  of  finishing-school  rebellion,  her 
hurried  protestations  of  virginity,  above  all  her  in- 
curable Philistinism.  One  need  not  be  told  that  she 
admires  the  late  Major  General  Roosevelt  and  Mrs. 
Atherton,  that  she  wallows  in  the  poetry  of  Keats. 
One  knows  quite  as  well  that  her  phonograph  plays 
the  "Peer  Gynt"  suite,  and  that  she  is  charmed  by 
the  syllogisms  of  G.  K.  Chesterton.  She  is,  in  brief, 
an  absolutely  typical  American  of  the  transition  stage 
between  Christian  Endeavor  and  civilization.  There 
is  in  her  a  definite  poison  of  ideas,  an  aesthetic  im- 
pulse that  will  not  down — but  every  time  she  yields 
to  it  she  is  halted  and  plucked  back  by  qualms  and 
doubts,  by  the  dominant  superstitions  of  her  race  and 
time,  by  the  dead  hand,.of  her  kirk-crazy  Scotch  fore- 
bears. 

It  is  precisely  this  grisly  touch  upon  her  shoulder 


THE  BUTTE  BASHKIRTSEFF  125 

that  stimulates  her  to  those  naive  explosions  of  scan- 
dalous confidence  which  make  her  what  she  is.  If 
there  were  no  sepulchral  voice  in  her  ear,  warning 
her  that  it  is  the  mark  of  a  hussy  to  be  kissed  by  a 
man  with  "iron-gray  hair,  a  brow  like  Apollo  and  a 
jowl  like  Bill  Sykes,"  she  would  not  confess  it  and 
boast  of  it,  as  she  does  on  page  121  of  "I,  Mary 
MacLane."  If  it  were  not  a  Presbyterian  axiom  that 
a  lady  who  says  "damn"  is  fit  only  to  join  the  white 
slaves,  she  would  not  pen  a  defiant  Damniad,  as  she 
does  on  pages  108,  109  and  110.  And  if  it  were 
not  held  universally  in  Butte  that  sex  passion  is  the 
exclusive  infirmity  of  the  male,  she  would  not  blab 
out  in  meeting  that — but  here  I  get  into  forbidden 
waters  and  had  better  refer  you  to  page  209.  It  is 
not  the  godless  voluptuary  who  patronizes  leg-shows 
and  the  cabaret;  it  is  the  Methodist  deacon  with  un- 
accustomed vine-leaves  in  his  hair.  It  is  not  genuine 
artists,  serving  beauty  reverently  and  proudly,  who 
herd  in  Greenwich  Village  and  bawl  for  art;  it  is  pre- 
cisely a  mob  of  Middle  Western  Baptists  to  whom  the 
very  idea  of  art  is  still  novel,  and  intoxicating,  and 
more  than  a  little  bawdy.  And  to  make  an  end,  it  is 
not  cocottes  who  read  the  highly-spiced  magazines 
which  burden  all  the  book-stalls;  it  is  sedentary  mar- 
ried women  who,  while  faithful  to  their  depressing 
husbands  in  the  flesh,  yet  allow  their  imaginations  to 
play  furtively  upon  the  charms  of  theoretical  intrigues 


126  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

with  such   pretty   fellows   as   Francis   X.   Bushman, 

Enrico  Caruso  and  Vincent  Astor. 

An  understanding  of  this  plain  fact  not  only  ex- 
plains the  MacLane  and  her  gingery  carnalities  of  the 
chair;  it  also  explains  a  good  part  of  latter-day  Amer- 
ican literature.  That  literature  is  the  self-expression 
of  a  people  who  have  got  only  half  way  up  the  ladder 
leading  from  moral  slavery  to  intellectual  freedom. 
At  every  step  there  is  a  warning  tug,  a  protest  from 
below.  Sometimes  the  climber  docilely  drops  back; 
sometimes  he  emits  a  petulant  defiance  and  reaches 
boldly  for  the  next  round.  It  is  this  occasional  de- 
fiance which  accounts  for  the  periodical  efflorescence 
of  mere  school-boy  naughtiness  in  the  midst  of  our 
oleaginous  virtue — for  the  shouldering  out  of  the 
Ladies'  Home  Journal  by  magazines  of  adultery  all 
compact — for  the  provocative  baring  of  calf  and 
scapula  by  women  who  regard  it  as  immoral  to  take 
Benedictine  with  their  coffee — for  the  peopling  of 
Greenwich  Village  by  oafs  who  think  it  a  devilish  ad- 
venture to  victual  in  cellars,  and  read  Krafft-Ebing, 
and  stare  at  the  corset-scarred  nakedness  of  decadent 
cloak-models. 

I  have  said  that  the  climber  is  but  half  way  up  the 
ladder.  I  wish  I  could  add  that  he  is  moving  ahead, 
but  the  truth  is  that  he  is  probably  quite  stationary. 
We  have  our  spasms  of  revolt,  our  flarings  up  of  peek- 


THE  BUTTE  BASHKIRTSEFF  127 

aboo  waists,  free  love  and  "art,"  but  a  mighty  back- 
wash of  piety  fetches  each  and  every  one  of  them  soon 
or  late.  A  mongrel  and  inferior  people,  incapable  of 
any  spiritual  aspiration  above  that  of  second-rate  Eng- 
lish colonials,  we  seek  refuge  inevitably  in  the  one 
sort  of  superiority  that  the  lower  castes  of  men  can 
authentically  boast,  to  wit,  superiority  in  docility,  in 
credulity,  in  resignation,  in  morals.  We  are  the  most 
moral  race  in  the  world;  there  is  not  another  that  we 
do  not  look  down  upon  in  that  department;  our  con- 
fessed aim  and  destiny  as  a  nation  is  to  inoculate  them 
all  with  our  incomparable  rectitude.  In  the  last 
analysis,  all  ideas  are  judged  among  us  by  moral  v 
standards;  moral  values  are  our  only  permanent  tests 
of  worth,  whether  in  the  arts,  in  politics,  in  philosophy 
or  in  life  itself.  Even  the  instincts  of  man,  so  in- 
trinsically immoral,  so  innocent,  are  fitted  with  moral 
false-faces.  That  bedevilment  by  sex  ideas  which 
punishes  continence,  so  abhorrent  to  nature,  is  con- 
verted into  a  moral  frenzy,  pathological  in  the  end. 
The  impulse  to  cavort  and  kick  up  one's  legs,  so 
healthy,  so  universal,  is  hedged  in  by  incomprehensi- 
ble taboos;  it  becomes  stealthy,  dirty,  degrading. 
The  desire  to  create  and  linger  over  beauty,  the  sign 
and  touchstone  of  man's  rise  above  the  brute,  is  held 
down  by  doubts  and  hesitations;  when  it  breaks 
through  it  must  do  so  by  orgy  and  explosion,  half  lu- 


128  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

dicrous  and  half  pathetic.  Our  function,  we  choose  to 
believe,  is  to  teach  and  inspire  the  world.  We  are 
wrong.  Our  function  is  to  amuse  the  world.  We  are 
the  Bryan,  the  Henry  Ford,  the  Billy  Sunday  among 
the  nations.  .  .  . 


XI.    SIX   MEMBERS    OF   THE 
I N  S  T I T  U  TE 


The  Boudoir  Balzac 

THE  late  Percival  Pollard  was,  in  my  nonage, 
one  of  my  enthusiasms,  and,  later  on,  one  of 
my  friends.  How,  as  a  youngster,  I  used  to 
lie  in  wait  for  the  Criterion  every  week,  and  devour 
Pollard,  Huneker,  Meltzer  and  Vance  Thompson! 
That  was  in  the  glorious  middle  nineties  and  savory 
pots  were  brewing.  Scarcely  a  week  went  by  without 
a  new  magazine  of  some  unearthly  Tendenz  or  other 
appearing  on  the  stands;  scarcely  a  month  failed  to 
bring  forth  its  new  genius.  Pollard  was  up  to  his 
hips  in  the  movement.  He  had  a  hand  for  every 
debutante.  He  knew  everything  that  was  going  on. 
Polyglot,  catholic,  generous,  alert,  persuasive,  for- 
ever oscillating  between  New  York  and  Paris,  London 
and  Berlin,  he  probably  covered  a  greater  territory  in 
the  one  art  of  letters  than  Huneker  covered  in  all 
seven.  He  worked  so  hard  as  introducer  of  intel- 
lectual ambassadors,  in  fact,  that  he  never  had  time 
to  write  his  own  books.     One  very  brilliant  volume, 

129 


130  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

"Masks  and  Minstrels  of  New  Germany,"  adequately 
represents  him.  The  rest  of  his  criticism,  clumsily 
dragged  from  the  files  of  the  Criterion  and  Town 
Topics,  is  thrown  together  ineptly  in  "Their  Day  in 
Court."  Death  sneaked  upon  him  from  behind;  he 
was  gone  before  he  could  get  his  affairs  in  order.  I 
shall  never  forget  his  funeral — no  doubt  a  fit  finish 
for  a  critic.  Not  one  of  the  authors  he  had  whooped 
and  battled  for  was  present — not  one,  that  is,  save  old 
Ambrose  Bierce.  Bierce  came  in  an  elegant  plug-hat 
and  told  me  some  curious  anecdotes  on  the  way  to  the 
crematory,  chiefly  of  morgues,  dissecting-rooms  and 
lonely  church-yards:  he  was  the  most  gruesome  of 
men.  A  week  later,  on  a  dark,  sleety  Christmas 
morning,  I  returned  to  the  crematory,  got  the  ashes, 
and  shipped  them  West.  Pollard  awaits  the  Second 
Coming  of  his  Redeemer  in  Iowa,  hard  by  the  birth- 
place of  Prof.  Dr.  Stuart  P.  Sherman.  Well,  let  us 
not  repine.  Huneker  lives  in  Flatbush  and  was  born 
in  Philadelphia.  Cabell  is  a  citizen  of  Richmond, 
Va.  Willa  Sibert  Cather  was  once  one  of  the  editors 
of  McClures  Magazine.  Dreiser,  before  his  annun- 
ciation, edited  dime  novels  for  Street  &  Smith,  and 
will  be  attended  by  a  Methodist  friar,  I  daresay,  on 
the  gallows.  .  .  . 

Pollard,  as  I  say,  was  a  man  I  respected.  He  knew 
a  great  deal.  Half  English,  half  German  and  wholly 
cosmopolitan,  he  brought  valuable  knowledges  and 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     131 

enthusiasms  to  the  developing  American  literature  of 
his  time.  Moreover,  I  had  affection  for  him  as  well 
as  respect,  for  he  was  a  capital  companion  at  the 
Biertisch  and  was  never  too  busy  to  waste  a  lecture 
on  my  lone  ear — say  on  Otto  Julius  Bierbaum  (one 
of  his  friends),  or  Anatole  France,  or  the  technic  of 
the  novel,  or  the  scoundrelism  of  publishers.  It  thus 
pains  me  to  violate  his  tomb — but  let  his  shade  for- 
give me  as  it  hopes  to  be  forgiven!  For  it  was  Pol- 
lard, I  believe,  who  set  going  the  doctrine  that  Robert 
W.  Chambers  is  a  man  of  talent — a  bit  too  commer-  /' 
cial,  perhaps,  but  still  fundamentally  a  man  of  talent. 
You  will  find  it  argued  at  length  in  "Their  Day  in 
Court."  There  Pollard  called  the  roll  of  the  "prom- 
ising young  men"  of  the  time,  circa  1908.  They  were 
Winston  Churchill,  David  Graham  Phillips — and 
Chambers !  Alas,  for  all  prophets  and  their  prognos- 
tications! Phillips,  with  occasional  reversions  to 
honest  work,  devoted  most  of  his  later  days  to  sensa- 
tional serials  for  the  train-boy  magazines,  and  when 
he  died  his  desk  turned  out  to  be  full  of  them,  and 
they  kept  dribbling  along  for  three  or  four  years. 
Churchill,  seduced  by  the  uplift,  has  become  an 
evangelist  and  a  bore — a  worse  case,  even,  than  that 
of  H.  G.  Wells.  And  Chambers?  Let  the  New  York 
Times  answer.  Here,  in  all  sobriety,  is  its  descrip- 
tion of  the  heroine  of  "The  Moonlit  Way,"  one  of  his 
latest  pieces: 


132  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

She  is  a  lovely  and  fascinating  dancer  who,  before  the 
war,  held  the  attention  of  all  Europe  and  incited  a  great 
many  men  who  had  nothing  better  to  do  to  fall  in  love 
with  her.  She  bursts  upon  the  astonished  gaze  of  several 
of  the  important  characters  of  the  story  when  she  dashes 
into  the  ballroom  of  the  German  Embassy  standing  upon  a 
bridled  ostrich,  which  she  compels  to  dance  and  go  through 
its  paces  at  her  command.  She  is  dressed,  Mr.  Chambers 
assures  us,  in  nothing  but  the  skin  of  her  virtuous  youth, 
modified  slightly  by  a  yashmak  and  a  zone  of  blue  jewels 
about  her  hips  and  waist. 

The  italics  are  mine.  I  wonder  what  poor  Pollard 
would  think  of  it.  He  saw  the  shoddiness  in  Cham- 
bers, the  leaning  toward  "profitable  pot-boiling,"  but 
he  saw,  too,  a  fundamental  earnestness  and  a  high 
degree  of  skill.  What  has  become  of  these  things? 
Are  they  visible,  even  as  ghosts,  in  the  preposterous 
serials  that  engaud  the  magazines  of  Mr.  Hearst,  and 
then  load  the  department-stores  as  books?  Were 
they,  in  fact,  ever  there  at  all?  Did  Pollard  observe 
them,  or  did  he  merely  imagine  them?  I  am  inclined 
to  think  that  he  merely  imagined  them — that  his  de- 
light in  what  he  described  as  "many  admirable 
tricks"  led  him  into  a  fatuity  that  he  now  has  an 
eternity  to  regret.  Chambers  grows  sillier  and  sillier, 
emptier  and  emptier,  worse  and  worse.  But  was  he 
ever  more  than  a  fifth-rater?  I  doubt  it.  Let  us  go 
back  half  a  dozen  years,  to  the  days  before  the  war 
forced  the  pot-boiler  down  into  utter  imbecility.     I 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE  133 
choose,  at  random,  "The  Gay  Rebellion."  Here  is  a 
specimen  of  the  dialogue : 

"It  startled  me.  How  did  I  know  what  it  might  have 
been?     It  might  have  been  a  bear — or  a  cow." 

"You  talk,"  said  Sayre  angrily,  "like  William  Dean 
Howells!     Haven't  you  any  romance  in  you?" 

"Not  what  you  call  romance.  Pass  the  flapjacks." 
Sayre  passed  them. 

"My  attention,"  he  said,  "instantly  became  riveted  upon 
the  bushes.  I  strove  to  pierce  them  with  a  piercing  glance. 
Suddenly—" 

"Sure!     'Suddenly'  always  comes  next." 

"Suddenly  .  .  .  the  leaves  were  stealthily  parted, 
and—" 

"A  naked  savage  in  full  war  paint — " 

"Naked  nothing!  a  young  girl  in — a  perfectly  fitting 
gown  stepped  noiselessly  out." 

"Out  of  what,  you  gink?" 

"The  bushes,  dammit!  .  .  .  She  looked  at  me;  I  gazed 
at  her.    Somehow — " 

"In  plainer  terms,  she  gave  you  the  eye.     What?" 

"That's  a  peculiarly  coarse  observation." 

"Then  tell  it  in  your  own  way." 

"I  will.  The  sunlight  fell  softly  upon  the  trees  of  the 
ancient  wood." 

'Woodn't  that  bark  you!" 

And  so  on,  and  so  on,  for  page  after  page.  Can 
you  imagine  more  idiotic  stuff — "pierce  and  pierc- 
ing," "you  gink,"  "she  gave  you  the  eye,"  "woodn't 
that  bark  you?"     One  is  reminded  of  horrible  things 


134  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

— the  repartees  of  gas-house  comedians  in  vaudeville, 
the  whimsical  editorials  in  Life,  the  forbidding  ghoul- 
eries  of  Irvin  Cobb  among  jokes  pale  and  clammy  in 
death.  .  .  .  But  let  us,  you  may  say,  go  back  a  bit 
further — back  to  the  days  of  the  Chap-Book.  There 
was  then,  perhaps,  a  far  different  Chambers — a  fel- 
low of  sound  talent  and  artistic  self-respect,  well  de- 
serving the  confidence  and  encouragement  of  Pollard. 
Was  there,  indeed?  If  you  think  so,  go  read  "The 
King  in  Yellow,"  circa  1895 — if  you  can.  I  myself, 
full  of  hope,  have  tried  it.  In  it  I  have  found  drivel 
almost  as  dull  as  that,  say,  in  "Ailsa  Page." 


A  Stranger  on  Parnassus 

The  case  of  Hamlin  Garland  belongs  to  pathos  in 
the  grand  manner,  as  you  will  discover  on  reading 
his  autobiography,  "A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border." 
What  ails  him  is  a  vision  of  beauty,  a  seductive  strain 
of  bawdy  music  over  the  hills.  He  is  a  sort  of  male 
Mary  MacLane,  but  without  either  Mary's  capacity  for 
picturesque  blasphemy  or  her  skill  at  plain  English. 
The  vision,  in  his  youth,  tore  him  from  his  prairie 
plow  and  set  him  to  clawing  the  anthills  at  the  foot 
of  Parnassus.  He  became  an  elocutionist — what,  in 
modern  times,  would  be  called  a  chautauquan.  He 
aspired  to  write  for  the  Atlantic  Monthly.     He  fell 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE  135 
under  the  spell  of  the  Boston  aluminados  of  1885, 
which  is  as  if  one  were  to  take  fire  from  a  June-bug. 
Finally,  after  embracing  the  Single  Tax,  he  achieved 
a  couple  of  depressing  story-books,  earnest,  honest 
and  full  of  indignation. 

American  criticism,  which  always  mistakes  a  poign- 
ant document  for  aesthetic  form  and  organization, 
greeted  these  moral  volumes  as  works  of  art,  and  so 
Garland  found  himself  an  accepted  artist  and  has 
made  shift  to  be  an  artist  ever  since.  No  more  gro- 
tesque miscasting  of  a  diligent  and  worthy  man  is 
recorded  in  profane  history.  He  has  no  more  feeling 
for  the  intrinsic  dignity  of  beauty,  no  more  compre- 
hension of  it  as  a  thing  in  itself,  than  a  policeman. 
He  is,  and  always  has  been,  a  moralist  endeavoring 
ineptly  to  translate  his  messianic^passion  into  aesthetic 
terms,  and  always  failing.  "A  Son  of  the  Middle 
Border,"  undoubtedly  the  best  of  all  his  books,  pro- 
jects his  failure  brilliantly.  It  is,  in  substance,  a 
document  of  considerable  value — a  naive  and  often 
highly  illuminating  contribution  to  the  history  of  the 
American  peasantry.  It  is,  in  form,  a  thoroughly 
third-rate  piece  of  writing — amateurish,  flat,  banal, 
repellent.  Garland  gets  facts  into  it;  he  gets  the  re- 
lentless sincerity  of  the  rustic  Puritan;  he  gets  a  sort 
of  evangelical  passion.  But  he  doesn't  get  any  *"" 
charm.     He  doesn't  get  any  beauty. 

In  such  a  career,  as  in  such  a  book,  there  is  some- 


136  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

thing  profoundly  pathetic.  One  follows  the  progress 
of  the  man  with  a  constant  sense  that  he  is  steering 
by  faulty  compasses,  that  fate  is  leading  him  into 
paths  too  steep  and  rocky — nay,  too  dark  and  lovely — 
for  him.  An  awareness  of  beauty  is  there,  and  a 
wistful  desire  to  embrace  it,  but  the  confident  gusto 
of  the  artist  is  always  lacking.  What  one  encounters 
in  its  place  is  the  enthusiasm  of  the  pedagogue,  the 
desire  to  yank  the  world  up  to  the  soaring  Methodist 
level,  the  hot  yearning  to  displace  old  ideas  with  new 
ideas,  and  usually  much  worse  ideas,  for  example,  the 
Single  Tax  and  spook-chasing.  The  natural  goal  of 
the  man  was  the  evangelical  stump.  He  was  led 
astray  when  those  Boston  Brahmins  of  the  last  genera- 
tion, enchanted  by  his  sophomoric  platitudes  about 
Shakespeare,  set  him  up  as  a  critic  of  the  arts,  and 
then  as  an  imaginative  artist.  He  should  have  gone 
back  to  the  saleratus  belt,  taken  to  the  chautauquas, 
preached  his  foreordained  perunas,  got  himself  into 
Congress,  and  so  helped  to  save  the  republic  from  the 
demons  that  beset  it.  What  a  gladiator  he  would 
have  made  against  the  Plunderbund,  the  White  Slave 
Traffic,  the  Rum  Demon,  the  Kaiser!  What  a  rival 
to  the  Hon.  Claude  Kitchin,  the  Rev.  Dr.  Newell 
Dwight  Hillis! 

His  worst  work,  I  daresay,  is  in  some  of  his  fic- 
tion— for  example,  in  "The  Forester's  Daughter." 
But  my  own  favorite  among  his  books  is  "The  Shadow 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     137 

World,"  a  record  of  his  communings  with  the  gaseous 
precipitates  of  the  departed.  He  takes  great  pains 
at  the  start  to  assure  us  that  he  is  a  man  of  alert  in- 
telligence and  without  prejudices  or  superstitions. 
He  has  no  patience,  it  appears,  with  those  idiots  who 
swallow  the  buffooneries  of  spiritualist  mediums  too 
greedily.  For  him  the  scientific  method — the  method 
which  examines  all  evidence  cynically  and  keeps  on 
doubting  until  the  accumulated  proof,  piled  moun- 
tain-high, sweeps  down  in  an  overwhelming  avalanche. 
.  .  .  Thus  he  proceeds  to  the  haunted  chamber  and 
begins  his  dalliance  with  the  banshees.  They  touch 
him  with  clammy,  spectral  hands;  they  wring  music 
for  him  out  of  locked  pianos ;  they  throw  heavy  tables 
about  the  room;  they  give  him  messages  from  the 
golden  shore  and  make  him  the  butt  of  their  coarse, 
transcendental  humor.  Through  it  all  he  sits  tightly 
and  solemnly,  his  mind  open  and  his  verdict  up  his 
sleeve.  He  is  belligerently  agnostic,  and  calls  at- 
tention to  it  proudly.  .  .  .  Then,  in  the  end,  he  gives 
himself  away.  One  of  his  fellow  "scientists,"  more 
frankly  credulous,  expresses  the  belief  that  real  scien- 
tists will  soon  prove  the  existence  of  spooks.  "I  hope 
they  will,"  says  the  agnostic  Mr.  Garland.  .  .  . 

Well,  let  us  not  laugh.  The  believing  mind  is  a 
curious  thing.  It  must  absorb  its  endless  rations  of 
balderdash,  or  perish.  ...  "A  Son  of  the  Middle 
Border"  is  less  amusing,  but  a  good  deal  more  re- 


138  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

spectable.  It  is  an  honest  book.  There  is  some 
bragging  in  it,  of  course,  but  not  too  much.  It  tells  an 
interesting  story.  It  radiates  hard  effort  and  earnest 
purpose.  .  .  .  But  what  a  devastating  exposure  of  a 
member  of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Let- 
ters! 

3 

A  Merchant  of  Mush 

Henry  Sydnor  Harrison  is  thoroughly  American  to 
this  extent:  that  his  work  is  a  bad  imitation  of  some- 
thing English.  Find  me  a  second-rate  American  in 
any  of  the  arts  and  I'll  find  you  his  master  and  pro- 
totype among  third,  fourth  or  fifth-rate  Englishmen. 
In  the  present  case  the  model  is  obviously  W.  J.  Locke. 
But  between  master  and  disciple  there  is  a  great  gap. 
Locke,  at  his  high  points,  is  a  man  of  very  palpable 
merit.  He  has  humor.  He  has  ingenuity.  He  has 
a  keen  eye  for  the  pathos  that  so  often  lies  in  the  ab- 
surd. I  can  discover  no  sign  of  any  of  these  things 
in  Harrison's  100,000  word  Christmas  cards.  They 
are  simply  sentimental  bosh — huge  gum-drops  for  fat 
women  to  snuffle  over.  Locke's  grotesque  and  often 
extremely  amusing  characters  are  missing;  in  place 
of  them  there  are  the  heroic  cripples,  silent  lovers, 
maudlin  war  veterans  and  angelic  grandams  of  the 
old-time  Sunday-school  books.  The  people  of  "V. 
V.'s  Eyes"  are  preposterous  and  the  thesis  is  too  silly 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     139 

to  be  stated  in  plain  words.  No  sane  person  would 
believe  it  if  it  were  put  into  an  affidavit.  "Queed" 
is  simply  Locke  diluted  with  vast  drafts  from  "Lad- 
die" and  "Pollyanna."  Queed,  himself,  long  before 
the  end,  becomes  a  marionette  without  a  toe  on  the 
ground;  his  Charlotte  is  incredible  from  the  start. 
"Angela's  Business"  touches  the  bottom  of  the  tear- 
jug;  it  would  be  impossible  to  imagine  a  more  vapid 
story.  Harrison,  in  fact,  grows  more  mawkish  book 
by  book.  He  is  touched,  I  should  say,  by  the  delu- 
sion that  he  has  a  mission  to  make  life  sweeter,  to 
preach  the  Finer  Things,  to  radiate  Gladness.  What! 
More  Gladness?  Another  volt  or  two,  and  all  civil- 
ized adults  will  join  the  Italians  and  Jugo-Slavs  in 
their  headlong  hegira.  A  few  more  amperes,  and 
the  land  will  be  abandoned  to  the  Jews,  the  ex-Con- 
federates and  the  Bolsheviki. 

4 
The  Last  of  the  Victorians 

If  William  Allen  White  lives  as  long  as  Tennyson, 
and  does  not  reform,  our  grandchildren  will  see  the 
Victorian  era  gasping  out  its  last  breath  in  1951. 
And  eighty-three  is  no  great  age  in  Kansas,  where 
sin  is  unknown.  It  may  be,  in  fact,  1960,  or  even 
1970,  before  the  world  hears  the  last  of  Honest  Pov- 
erty, Chaste  Affection  and  Manly  Tears.     For  so  long 


140  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

as  White  holds  a  pen  these  ancient  sweets  will  be  on 
sale  at  the  department-store  book-counters,  and  they 
will  grow  sweeter  and  sweeter,  I  daresay,  as  he  works 
them  over  and  over.  In  his  very  first  book  of  fiction 
there  was  a  flavor  of  chewing-gum  and  marshmallows. 
In  "A  Certain  Rich  Man"  the  intelligent  palate  de- 
tected saccharine.  In  "In  the  Heart  of  a  Fool,"  his 
latest,  the  thing  is  carried  a  step  further.  If  you  are 
a  forward-looker  and  a  right-thinker,  if  you  believe 
that  God  is  in  His  heaven  and  all  is  for  the  best,  if 
you  yearn  to  uplift  and  like  to  sob,  then  the  volume 
will  probably  affect  you,  in  the  incomparable  phrase 
of  Clayton  Hamilton,  like  "the  music  of  a  million 
Easter-lilies  leaping  from  the  grave  and  laughing  with 
a  silver  singing."  But  if  you  are  a  carnal  fellow, 
as  I  am,  with  a  stomach  ruined  by  alcohol,  it  will  gag 
you. 

When  I  say  that  White  is  a  Victorian  I  do  not  al- 
lude, of  course,  to  the  Victorianism  of  Thackeray  and 
Tennyson,  but  to  that  of  Felicia  Hemens,  of  Samuel 
Smiles  and  of  Dickens  at  his  most  maudlin.  Perhaps 
an  even  closer  relative  is  to  be  found  in  "The 
Duchess."  White,  like  "The  Duchess"  is  absolutely 
humorless,  and,  when  he  begins  laying  on  the  mayon- 
naise, absolutely  shameless.  I  daresay  the  same  sort 
of  reader  admires  both:  the  high-school  girl  first 
seized  by  amorous  tremors,  the  obese  multipara  in  her 
greasy  kimono,  the  remote  and  weepful  farm-wife. 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     141 

But  here  a  doubt  intrudes  itself:  is  it  possible  to 
imagine  a  woman  sentimental  enough  to  survive  "In 
the  Heart  of  a  Fool"?  I  am  constrained  to  question 
it.  In  women,  once  they  get  beyond  adolescence, 
there  is  always  a  saving  touch  of  irony;  the  life  they 
lead  infallibly  makes  cynics  of  them,  though  some- 
times they  don't  know  it.  Observe  the  books  they 
write — chiefly  sardonic  stuff,  with  heroes  who  are 
fools.  Even  their  "glad"  books,  enormously  success- 
ful among  other  women,  stop  far  short  of  the  senti- 
mentality put  between  covers  by  men — for  example, 
the  aforesaid  Harrison,  Harold  Bell  Wright  and  the 
present  White.  Nay,  it  is  the  male  sex  that  snuffles 
most  and  is  easiest  touched,  particularly  in  America. 
The  American  man  is  forever  falling  a  victim  to  his 
tender  feelings.  It  was  by  that  route  that  the  col- 
lectors for  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  reached  him;  it  is  thus 
that  he  is  bagged  incessantly  by  political  tear-squeez- 
ers ;  it  is  precisely  his  softness  that  makes  him  the  slave 
of  his  women-folk.  What  White  gives  him  is  exactly 
the  sort  of  mush  that  is  on  tap  in  the  chautauquas. 
"In  the  Heart  of  a  Fool,"  like  "A  Certain  Rich  Man" 
is  aimed  deliberately  and  with  the  utmost  accuracy  at 
the  delicate  gizzard  of  the  small-town  yokel,  the 
small-town  yokel  male,  the  horrible  end-product  of 
fifty  years  of  Christian  Endeavor,  the  little  red  school- 
house  and  the  direct  primary. 

The  White  formula  is  simple  to  the  verge  of  aus- 


142  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

terity.     It  is,  in  essence,  no  more  than  a  dramatization 
of  all  the  current  political  and  sociological  rumble- 
bumble,  by  Roosevelt  out  of  Coxey's  Army,  with  mu- 
sic by  the  choir  of  the  First  Methodist  Church.     On 
the  one  side  are  the  Hell  Hounds  of  Plutocracy,  the 
Money    Demons,    the    Plunderbund,    and    their    at- 
tendant   Bosses,    Strike    Breakers,    Seducers,    Nietz- 
scheans,  Free  Lovers,  Atheists  and  Corrupt  Journal- 
ists.    On  the  other  side  are  the  great  masses  of  the 
plain  people,   and   their   attendant   Uplifters,   Good 
Samaritans,  Honest  Workingmen,  Faithful  Husbands, 
Inspired   Dreamers    and   tin-horn    Messiahs.     These 
two  armies  join  battle,  the  Bad  against  the  Good,  and 
for  five  hundred  pages  or  more  the  Good  get  all  the 
worst  of  it.     Their  jobs  are  taken  away  from  them, 
their  votes  are  bartered,  their  mortgages  are  fore- 
closed, their  women  are  debauched,  their  savings  are 
looted,  their  poor  orphans  are  turned  out  to  starve. 
A  sad  business,  surely.     One  wallows  in  almost  un- 
endurable emotions.     The  tears  gush.     It  is  as  affect- 
ing as  a  movie.     Even  the  prose  rises  to  a  sort  of 
gospel-tent  chant,  like  that  of  a  Baptist  Savonarola, 
with  every  second  sentence  beginning  with  and,  but 
or  for.  .  .  .  But  we  are  already  near  the  end,  and  no 
escape  is  in  sight.     Can  it  be  that  White  is  stumped, 
like  Mark  Twain  in  his  mediaeval  romance — that  Vir- 
tue will  succumb  to  the  Interests?     Do  not  fear!     In 
the  third  from  the  last  chapter  Hen  Jackson,  the  stage- 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     143 
hand,  returns  from  the  Dutchman's  at  the  corner  and 
throws  on  a  rose  spot-light,  and  then  an  amber,  and 
then  a  violet,  and  then  a  blue.     One  by  one  the  rays 
of  Hope  begin  to  shoot  across  the  stage,  Dr.  Hamil- 
ton's Easter-lilies  leap  from  their  tomb,  the  dramatis 
persona;   (all  save  the  local  J.  Pierpont  Morgan!) 
begin  "laughing  with  a  silver  singing,"  and  as  the 
curtain  falls  the  whole  scene  is  bathed  in  luminifer- 
ous  ether,  and  the  professor  breaks  into  "Onward, 
Christian  Soldiers!"  on  the  cabinet-organ,  and  there 
is  a  happy,  comfortable  sobbing,  and  an  upward  roll- 
ing of  eyes,  and  a  vast  blowing  of  noses.     In  brief, 
the  finish  of  a  chautauqua  lecture  on  "The  Grand  Fu- 
ture of  America,   or,  The  Glory  of  Service."     In 
brief,  slobber.  .  .  . 

It  would  be  difficult  to  imagine  more  saccharine 
writing  or  a  more  mawkish  and  preposterous  point  of 
view.  Life,  as  White  sees  it,  is  a  purely  moral 
phenomenon,  like  living  pictures  by  the  Epworth 
League.  The  virtuous  are  the  downtrodden;  the  up 
and  doing  are  all  scoundrels.  It  pays  to  be  poor  and 
pious.  Ambition  is  a  serpent.  One  honest  Knight 
of  Pythias  is  worth  ten  thousand  Rockefellers.  The 
pastor  is  always  right.  So  is  the  Ladies'  Home 
Journal.  The  impulse  that  leads  a  young  yokel  of, 
say,  twenty-two  to  seek  marriage  with  a  poor  working- 
girl  of,  say,  eighteen,  is  the  most  elevating,  noble, 
honorable  and  godlike  impulse  native  to  the  human 


144  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

consciousness.  ...  Not  the  slightest  sign  of  an  ap- 
prehension of  life  as  the  gaudiest  and  most  gorgeous 
of  spectacles — not  a  trace  of  healthy  delight  in  the 
eternal  struggle  for  existence — not  the  faintest  sug- 
gestion of  Dreiser's  great  gusto  or  of  Conrad's  pene- 
trating irony!     Not  even  in  the  massive  fact  of  death 
itself _and?  like  all  the  other  Victorians,  this  one  from 
the  Kansas  steppes  is  given  to  wholesale  massacres — 
does  he  see  anything  mysterious,  staggering,  awful,  in- 
explicable, but  only  an  excuse  for  a  sentimental  orgy. 
Alas,  what  would  you?     It  is  ghastly  drivel,  to  be 
sure,  but  isn't  it,  after  all,  thoroughly  American?     I 
have  an  uneasy  suspicion  that  it  is — that  "In  the 
Heart  of  a  Fool"  is,  at  bottom,  a  vastly  more  Ameri- 
can book  than  anything  that  James  Branch  Cabell  has 
done,  or  Vincent  O'Sullivan,  or  Edith  Wharton,  or 
even  Howells.     It  springs  from  the  heart  of  the  land. 
It  is  the  aesthetic  echo  of  thousands  of  movements,  of 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  sentimental  crusades,  of 
millions  of  ecstatic  gospel-meetings.     This  is  what 
the  authentic  American  public,  unpolluted  by  intelli- 
gence, wants.     And  this  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  the 
English  sniff  whenever  they  look  our  way.  .  .  . 

But  has  White  no  merit?  He  has.  He  is  an  hon- 
est and  a  respectable  man.  He  is  a  patriot.  He 
trusts  God.  He  venerates  what  is  left  of  the  Consti- 
tution. He  once  wrote  a  capital  editorial,  "What's 
the  Matter  With  Kansas?"     He  has  the  knack,  when 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     145 

his  tears  are  turned  off,  of  writing  a  clear  and  grace- 
ful English.  .  .  . 

5 

A  Bad  Novelist 

As  I  have  said,  it  is  not  the  artistic  merit  and  dig- 
nity of  a  novel,  but  often  simply  its  content  as  docu- 
ment, that  makes  for  its  success  in  the  United  States. 
The  criterion  of  truth  applied  to  it  is  not  the  criterion 
of  an  artist,  but  that  of  a  newspaper  editorial  writer; 
the  question  is  not,  Is  it  in  accord  with  the  profound- 
est  impulses  and  motives  of  humanity?  but  Is  it  in 
accord  with  the  current  pishposh?  This  accounts  for 
the  huge  popularity  of  such  confections  as  Upton 
Sinclair's  "The  Jungle"  and  Blasco  Ibanez's  "The 
Four  Horsemen  of  the  Apocalypse."  Neither  had 
much  value  as  a  work  of  art — at  all  events,  neither 
was  perceptibly  superior  to  many  contemporary 
novels  that  made  no  stir  at  all — but  each  had  the  ad- 
vantage of  reenforcing  an  emotion  already  aroused, 
of  falling  into  step  with  the  procession  of  the  moment. 
Had  there  been  no  fever  of  muck-raking  and  trust 
busting  in  1906,  "The  Jungle"  would  have  died  the 
death  in  the  columns  of  the  Appeal  to  Reason,  un- 
heard of  by  the  populace  in  general.  And  had  the 
United  States  been  engaged  against  France  instead  of 
for  France  in  1918,  there  would  have  been  no  argu- 
ment in  the  literary  weeklies  that  Blasco  was  a  novel- 


146  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

ist  of  the  first  rank  and  his  story  a  masterpiece  com- 
parable to  "Germinal." 

Sinclair  was  made  by  "The  Jungle"  and  has  been 
trying  his  hardest  to  unmake  himself  ever  since.  An- 
other of  the  same  sort  is  Ernest  Poole,  author  of  "The 
Harbor."  "The  Harbor,"  judged  by  any  intelligi- 
ble aesthetic  standard,  was  a  bad  novel.  Its  trans- 
actions were  forced  and  unconvincing;  its  central 
character  was  shadowy  and  often  incomprehensible; 
the  manner  of  its  writing  was  quite  without  distinction. 
But  it  happened  to  be  printed  at  a  time  when  the  chief 
ideas  in  it  had  a  great  deal  of  popularity — when  its 
vague  grappling  with  insoluble  sociological  problems 
was  the  sport  of  all  the  weeklies  and  of  half  the  more 
sober  newspapers — when  a  nebulous,  highfalutin 
Bolshevism  was  in  the  air — and  so  it  excited  interest 
and  took  on  an  aspect  of  profundity.  That  its  dis- 
cussion of  those  problems  was  superficial,  that  it  said 
nothing  new  and  got  nowhere — all  this  was  not  an  in- 
fluence against  its  success,  but  an  influence  in  favor 
of  its  success,  for  the  sort  of  mind  that  fed  upon  the 
nebulous,  professor-made  politics  and  sociology  of 
1915  was  the  sort  of  mind  that  is  chronically  avid 
of  half-truths  and  as  chronically  suspicious  of  forth- 
right thinking.  This  has  been  demonstrated  since 
that  time  by  its  easy  volte  face  in  the  presence  of  emo- 
tion.    The  very  ideas  that  Poole's  vapid  hero  toyed 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE  147 
with  in  1915,  to  the  delight  of  the  novel-reading  in- 
telligentsia, would  have  damned  the  book  as  a  pam- 
phlet for  the  I.  W.  W.,  or  even,  perhaps,  as  German 
propaganda,  three  years  later.  But  meanwhile,  it 
had  been  forgotten,  as  novels  are  always  forgotten, 
and  all  that  remained  of  it  was  a  general  impression 
that  Poole,  in  some  way  or  other,  was  a  superior  fel- 
low and  to  be  treated  with  respect. 

His  subsequent  books  have  tried  that  theory  se- 
verely. "The  Family"  was  grounded  upon  one  of 
the  elemental  tragedies  which  serve  a  novelist  most 
safely — the  dismay  of  an  aging  man  as  his  children 
drift  away  from  him.  Here  was  a  subject  full  of 
poignant  drama,  and  what  is  more,  drama  simple 
enough  to  develop  itself  without  making  any  great 
demand  upon  the  invention.  Poole  burdened  it  with 
too  much  background,  and  then  killed  it  altogether  by 
making  his  characters  wooden.  It  began  with  a  high 
air;  it  creaked  and  wobbled  at  the  close;  the  catas- 
trophe was  quite  without  effect.  "His  Second  Wife" 
dropped  several  stories  lower.  It  turned  out,  on 
inspection,  to  be  no  more  than  a  moral  tale,  feeble, 
wishy-washy  and  irritating.  Everything  in  it — about 
the  corrupting  effects  of  money-lust  and  display, 
about  the  swinishness  of  cabaret  "society"  in  New 
York,  about  the  American  male's  absurd  slavery  to 
his  women — had  been  said  before  by   such  gifted 


148  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Balzacs  as  Robert  W.  Chambers  and  Owen  Johnson, 
and,  what  is  more,  far  better  said.  The  writing,  in 
fact,  exactly  matched  the  theme.  It  was  labored, 
artificial,  dull.  In  the  whole  volume  there  was  not 
a  single  original  phrase.  Once  it  was  put  down,  not 
a  scene  remained  in  the  memory,  or  a  character.  It 
was  a  cheap,  a  hollow  and,  in  places,  almost  an  idi- 
otic book.  .  .  . 

At  the  time  I  write,  this  is  the  whole  product  of 
Poole  as  novelist:  three  novels,  bad,  worse,  worst. 


A  Broadway  Brandes 

I  have  hitherto,  in  discussing  White  de  Kansas,  pre- 
sented a  fragile  dahlia  from  the  rhetorical  garden  of 
Clayton  Hamilton,  M.A.  (Columbia).  I  now  print 
the  whole  passage: 

Whenever  in  a  world-historic  war  the  side  of  righteous- 
ness has  triumphed,  a  great  overflowing  of  art  has  fol- 
lowed soon  upon  the  fact  of  victory.  The  noblest  in- 
stincts of  mankind — aroused  in  perilous  moments  fraught 
with  intimations  of  mortality — have  surged  and  soared,  be- 
neath the  sunshine  of  a  subsequent  and  dear-bought  peace, 
into  an  immeasurable  empyrean  of  heroic  eloquence. 
Whenever  right  has  circumvented  might,  Art  has  sprung 
alive  into  the  world,  with  the  music  of  a  million  Easter- 
lilies  leaping  from  the  grave  and  laughing  with  a  silver 
singing. 


SIX  MEMBERS  OF  THE  INSTITUTE     149 

With  the  highest  respect  for  a  M agister  Artium,  a 
pedagogue  of  Columbia  University,  a  lecturer  in  Miss 
Spence's  School  and  the  Classical  School  for  Girls, 
and  a  vice-president  of  the  National  Institute  of  Arts 
and  Letters — Booh! 


XII.   THE    GENEALOGY    OF 
ETIQUETTE 

BARRING  sociology  (which  is  yet,  of  course, 
scarcely  a  science  at  all,  but  rather  a  monkey- 
shine  which  happens  to  pay,  like  play-acting 
or  theology),  psychology  is  the  youngest  of  the  sci- 
ences, and  hence  chiefly  guesswork,  empiricism, 
hocus-pocus,  poppycock.  On  the  one  hand,  there  are 
still  enormous  gaps  in  its  data,  so  that  the  determina- 
tion of  its  simplest  principles  remains  difficult,  not  to 
say  impossible;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  very  hol- 
lowness  and  nebulosity  of  it,  particularly  around  its 
edges,  encourages  a  horde  of  quacks  to  invade  it,  so- 
phisticate it  and  make  nonsense  of  it.  Worse,  this 
state  of  affairs  tends  to  such  confusion  of  effort  and 
direction  that  the  quack  and  the  honest  inquirer  are 
often  found  in  the  same  man.  It  is,  indeed,  a  com- 
monplace to  encounter  a  professor  who  spends  his 
days  in  the  laborious  accumulation  of  psychological 
statistics,  sticking  pins  into  babies  and  platting  upon 
a  chart  the  ebb  and  flow  of  their  yells,  and  his  nights 
chasing  poltergeists  and  other  such  celestial  fauna 
over  the  hurdles  of  a  spiritualist's  atelier,  or  gazing 

150 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE     151 

into  a  crystal  in  the  privacy  of  his  own  chamber. 
The  Binet  test  and  the  buncombe  of  mesmerism  are 
alike  the  children  of  what  we  roughly  denominate  psy- 
chology, and  perhaps  of  equal  legitimacy.  Even  so 
ingenious  and  competent  an  investigator  as  Prof.  Dr. 
Sigmund  Freud,  who  has  told  us  a  lot  that  is  of  the 
first  importance  about  the  materials  and  machinery  of 
thought,  has  also  told  us  a  lot  that  is  trivial  and  du- 
bious. The  essential  doctrines  of  Freudism,  no 
doubt,  come  close  to  the  truth,  but  many  of  Freud's 
remoter  deductions  are  far  more  scandalous  than 
sound,  and  many  of  the  professed  Freudians,  both 
American  and  European,  have  grease-paint  on  their 
noses  and  bladders  in  their  hands  and  are  otherwise 
quite  indistinguishable  from  evangelists  and  circus 
clowns. 

In  this  condition  of  the  science  it  is  no  wonder  that 
we  find  it  wasting  its  chief  force  upon  problems  that 
are  petty  and  idle  when  they  are  not  downright  and 
palpably  insoluble,  and  passing  over  problems  that 
are  of  immediate  concern  to  all  of  us,  and  that  might 
be  quite  readily  solved,  or,  at  any  rate,  considerably 
illuminated,  by  an  intelligent  study  of  the  data  al- 
ready available.  After  all,  not  many  of  us  care  a 
hoot  whether  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  and  the  Indian  chief 
Wok-a-wok-a-mok  are  happy  in  heaven,  for  not  many 
of  us  have  any  hope  or  desire  to  meet  them  there. 
Nor  are  we  greatly  excited  by  the  discovery  that,  of 


152  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

twenty-five  freshmen  who  are  hit  with  clubs,  17%  will 
say  "Ouch!"  and  22%  will  say  "Damn!";  nor  by  a 
table  showing  that  38.2  per  centum  of  all  men  accused 
of  homicide  confess  when  locked  up  with  the  carcasses 
of  their  victims,  including  23.4  per  centum  who  are 
innocent;  nor  by  plans  and  specifications,  by  Cagli- 
ostro  out  of  Lucrezia  Borgia,  for  teaching  poor,  God- 
forsaken school  children  to  write  before  they  can 
read  and  to  multiply  before  they  can  add;  nor  by  end- 
less disputes  between  half-witted  pundits  as  to  the 
precise  difference  between  perception  and  cognition; 
nor  by  even  longer  feuds,  between  pundits  even 
crazier,  over  free  will,  the  subconscious,  the  endo- 
neurium,  the  functions  of  the  corpora  quadrigemina, 
and  the  meaning  of  dreams  in  which  one  is  pursued  by 
hyenas,  process-servers  or  grass-widows. 

Nay;  we  do  not  bubble  with  rejoicing  when  such 
fruits  of  psychological  deep-down-diving  and  much- 
mud-upbringing  researches  are  laid  before  us,  for 
after  all  they  do  not  offer  us  any  nourishment,  there 
is  nothing  in  them  to  engage  our  teeth,  they  fail  to 
make  life  more  comprehensible,  and  hence  more  bear- 
able. What  we  yearn  to  know  something  about  is 
the  process  whereby  the  ideas  of  everyday  are  engen- 
dered in  the  skulls  of  those  about  us,  to  the  end  that 
we  may  pursue  a  straighter  and  a  safer  course  through 
the  muddle  that  is  life.  Why  do  the  great  majority 
of  Presbyterians  (and,  for  that  matter,  of  Baptists, 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE     153 

Episcopalians,  and  Swedenborgians  as  well)  regard 
it  as  unlucky  to  meet  a  black  cat  and  lucky  to  find  a 
pin?  What  are  the  logical  steps  behind  the  theory 
that  it  is  indecent  to  eat  peas  with  a  knife?  By  what 
process  does  an  otherwise  sane  man  arrive  at  the  con- 
clusion that  he  will  go  to  hell  unless  he  is  baptized  by 
total  immersion  in  water?  What  causes  men  to  be 
faithful  to  their  wives:  habit,  fear,  poverty,  lack  of 
imagination,  lack  of  enterprise,  stupidity,  religion? 
What  is  the  psychological  basis  of  commercial  moral- 
ity? What  is  the  true  nature  of  the  vague  pooling  of 
desires  that  Rousseau  called  the  social  contract? 
Why  Vloes  an  American  regard  it  as  scandalous  to 
wear  dress  clothes  at  a  funeral,  and  a  Frenchman  re- 
gard it  as  equally  scandalous  not  to  wear  them?  Why 
is  it  that  men  trust  one  another  so  readily,  and  women 
trust  one  another  so  seldom?  Why  are  we  all  so 
greatly  affected  by  statements  that  we  know  are  not 
true? — e.  g.  in  Lincoln's  Gettysburg  speech,  the  Decla- 
ration of  Independence  and  the  CIII  Psalm.  What  is 
the  origin  of  the  so-called  double  standard  of  moral- 
ity? Why  are  women  forbidden  to  take  off  their  hats 
in  church?  What  is  happiness?  Intelligence? 
Sin?     Courage?     Virtue?     Beauty? 

All  these  are  questions  of  interest  and  importance 
to  all  of  us,  for  their  solution  would  materially  im- 
prove the  accuracy  of  our  outlook  upon  the  world,  and 
with  it  our  mastery  of  our  environment,  but  the  psy- 


154  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

chologists,  busily  engaged  in  chasing  their  tails,  leave 
them  unanswered,  and,  in  most  cases,  even  unasked. 
The  late  William  James,  more  acute  than  the  general, 
saw  how  precious  little  was  known  about  the  psycho- 
logical inwardness  of  religion,  and  to  the  illumination 
of  this  darkness  he  addressed  himself  in  his  book, 
"The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience."  But  life 
being  short  and  science  long,  he  got  little  beyond  the 
statement  of  the  problem  and  the  marshaling  of  the 
grosser  evidence — and  even  at  this  business  he  al- 
lowed himself  to  be  constantly  interrupted  by  spooks, 
hobgoblins,  seventh  sons  of  seventh  sons  and  other 
such  characteristic  pets  of  psychologists.  In  the  same 
way  one  Gustav  le  Bon,  a  Frenchman,  undertook  a 
psychological  study  of  the  crowd  mind — and  then 
blew  up.  Add  the  investigations  of  Freud  and  his 
school,  chiefly  into  abnormal  states  of  mind,  and  those 
of  Lombroso  and  his  school,  chiefly  quackish  and  for 
the  yellow  journals,  and  the  idle  romancing  of  such 
inquirers  as  Prof.  Dr.  Thorstein  Veblen,  and  )|ou  have 
exhausted  the  list  of  contributions  to  what  pay  be 
called  practical  and  everyday  psychology.  The  rev. 
professors,  I  daresay,  have  been  doing  some  useful 
plowing  and  planting.  All  of  their  meticulous  pin- 
sticking  and  measuring  and  chart-making,  in  the 
course  of  time,  will  enable  their  successors  to  ap- 
proach the  real  problems  of  mind  with  more  assur- 
ance than  is  now  possible,  and  perhaps  help  to  their 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE     155 

solution.  But  in  the  meantime  the  public  and  social 
utility  of  psychology  remains  very  small,  for  it  is  still 
unable  to  differentiate  accurately  between  the  true  and 
the  false,  or  to  give  us  any  effective  protection  against 
the  fallacies,  superstitions,  crazes  and  hysterias  which 
rage  in  the  world. 

In  this  emergency  it  is  not  only  permissible  but 
even  laudable  for  the  amateur  to  sniff  inquiringly 
through  the  psychological  pasture,  essaying  modestly 
to  uproot  things  that  the  myopic  (or,  perhaps  more 
accurately,  hypermetropic)  professionals  have  over- 
looked. The  late  Friedrich  Wilhelm  Nietzsche  did 
it  often,  and  the  usufructs  were  many  curious  and 
daring  guesses,  some  of  them  probably  close  to  accu- 
racy, as  to  the  genesis  of  this,  that  or  the  other  com- 
mon delusion  of  man — i.  e.,  the  delusion  that  the  law 
of  the  survival  of  the  fittest  may  be  repealed  by  an 
act  of  Congress.  Into  the  same  field  several  very  in- 
teresting expeditions  have  been  made  by  Dr.  Elsie 
Clews  Parsons,  a  lady  once  celebrated  by  Park  Row 
for  her  invention  of  trial  marriage — an  invention,  by 
the  way,  in  which  the  Nietzsche  aforesaid  preceded 
her  by  at  least  a  dozen  years.  The  records  of  her  re- 
searches are  to  be  found  in  a  brief  series  of  books: 
"The  Family,"  "The  Old-Fashioned  Woman"  and 
"Fear  and  Conventionality."  Apparently  they  have 
wrung  relatively  little  esteem  from  the  learned,  for  I 
seldom  encounter  a  reference  to  them,  and  Dr.  Par- 


156  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

sons  herself  is  denied  the  very  modest  reward  of  men- 
tion in  "Who's  Who  in  America."  Nevertheless,  they 
are  extremely  instructive  books,  particularly  "Fear 
and  Conventionality."  I  know  of  no  other  work,  in- 
deed, which  offers  a  better  array  of  observations  upon 
that  powerful  complex  of  assumptions,  prejudices, 
instinctive  reactions,  racial  emotions  and  unbreakable 
vices  of  mind  which  enters  so  massively  into  the  daily 
thinking  of  all  of  us.  The  author  does  not  concern 
herself,  as  so  many  psychologists  fall  into  the  habit  of 
doing,  with  thinking  as  a  purely  laboratory  phenome- 
non, a  process  in  vacuo.  What  she  deals  with  is 
thinking  as  it  is  done  by  men  and  women  in  the 
real  world — thinking  that  is  only  half  intellectual,  the 
other  half  being  as  automatic  and  unintelligent  as 
swallowing,  blinking  the  eye  or  falling  in  love. 

The  power  of  the  complex  that  I  have  mentioned  is 
usually  very  much  underestimated,  not  only  by  psy- 
chologists, but  also  by  all  other  persons  who  pretend 
to  culture.  We  take  pride  in  the  fact  that  we  are 
thinking  animals,  and  like  to  believe  that  our  thoughts 
are  free,  but  the  truth  is  that  nine-tenths  of  them  are 
rigidly  conditioned  by  the  babbling  that  goes  on 
around  us  from  birth,  and  that  the  business  of  con- 
sidering this  babbling  objectively,  separating  the  true 
in  it  from  the  false,  is  an  intellectual  feat  of  such 
stupendous  difficulty  that  very  few  men  are  ever  able 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE     157 

to  achieve  it.  The  amazing  slanging  which  went  on 
between  the  English  professors  and  the  German  pro- 
fessors in  the  early  days  of  the  late  war  showed  how 
little  even  cold  and  academic  men  are  really  moved 
by  the  bald  truth  and  how  much  by  hot  and  unintel- 
ligible likes  and  dislikes.  The  patriotic  hysteria  of 
the  war  simply  allowed  these  eminent  pedagogues  to 
say  of  one  another  openly  and  to  loud  applause  what 
they  would  have  been  ashamed  to  say  in  times  of 
greater  amenity,  and  what  most  of  them  would  have 
denied  stoutly  that  they  believed.  Nevertheless,  it  is 
probably  a  fact  that  before  there  was  a  sign  of  war 
the  average  English  professor,  deep  down  in  his  heart, 
thought  that  any  man  who  ate  sauerkraut,  and  went  to 
the  opera  in  a  sackcoat,  and  intrigued  for  the  appella- 
tion of  Geheimrat,  and  preferred  German  music  to 
English  poetry,  and  venerated  Bismarck,  and  called 
his  wife  "Mutter,"  was  a  scoundrel.  He  did  not  say 
so  aloud,  and  no  doubt  it  would  have  offended  him 
had  you  accused  him  of  believing  it,  but  he  believed 
it  all  the  same,  and  his  belief  in  it  gave  a  muddy, 
bilious  color  to  his  view  of  German  metaphysics, 
German  electro-chemistry  and  the  German  chronology 
of  Babylonian  kings.  And  by  the  same  token  the 
average  German  professor,  far  down  in  the  ghostly 
recesses  of  his  hulk,  held  that  any  man  who  read  the 
London  Times,  and  ate  salt  fish  at  first  breakfast,  and 


158  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

drank  tea  of  an  afternoon,  and  spoke  of  Oxford  as  a 
university  was  a  Schafskopf,  a  Schuft  and  possibly 
even  a  Schweinehund. 

Nay,  not  one  of  us  is  a  free  agent.  Not  one  of  us 
actually  thinks  for  himself,  or  in  any  orderly  and 
scientific  manner.  The  pressure  of  environment,  of 
mass  ideas,  of  the  socialized  intelligence,  improperly 
so  called,  is  too  enormous  to  be  withstood.  No  Amer- 
ican, no  matter  how  sharp  his  critical  sense,  can 
ever  get  away  from  the  notion  that  democracy  is,  in 
some  subtle  and  mysterious  way,  more  conducive  to 
human  progress  and  more  pleasing  to  a  just  God  than 
any  of  the  systems  of  government  which  stand  op- 
posed to  it.  In  the  privacy  of  his  study  he  may  ob- 
serve very  clearly  that  it  exalts  the  facile  and  specious 
man  above  the  really  competent  man,  and  from  this 
observation  he  may  draw  the  conclusion  that  its  aban- 
donment would  be  desirable,  but  once  he  emerges 
from  his  academic  seclusion  and  resumes  the  rubbing 
of  noses  with  his  fellow-men,  he  will  begin  to  be  tor- 
tured by  a  sneaking  feeling  that  such  ideas  are  hereti- 
cal and  unmanly,  and  the  next  time  the  band  begins  to 
play  he  will  thrill  with  the  best  of  them — or  the  worst. 
The  actual  phenomenon,  in  truth,  was  copiously  on 
display  during  the  war.  Having  myself  the  charac- 
ter among  my  acquaintances  of  one  holding  the 
democratic  theory  in  some  doubt,  I  was  often  ap- 
proached by  gentlemen  who  told  me,  in  great  confi- 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE  159 
dence,  that  they  had  been  seized  by  the  same  tremors. 
Among  them  were  journalists  employed  daily  in  de- 
manding that  democracy  be  forced  upon  the  whole 
world,  and  army  officers  engaged,  at  least  theoreti- 
cally, in  forcing  it.  All  these  men,  in  reflective  mo- 
ments, struggled  with  ifs  and  buts.  But  every  one  of 
them,  in  his  public  capacity  as  a  good  citizen,  quickly 
went  back  to  thinking  as  a  good  citizen  was  then  ex- 
pected to  think,  and  even  to  a  certain  inflammatory 
ranting  for  what,  behind  the  door,  he  gravely  ques- 
tioned. .  .  . 

It  is  the  business  of  Dr.  Parsons,  in  "Fear  and 
Conventionality,"  to  prod  into  certain  of  the  ideas 
which  thus  pour  into  every  man's  mind  from  the  cir- 
cumambient air,  sweeping  away,  like  some  huge  cata- 
ract, the  feeble  resistance  that  his  own  powers  of  ratio- 
cination can  offer.  In  particular,  she  devotes  herself 
to  an  examination  of  those  general  ideas  which  con- 
dition the  thought  and  action  of  man  as  a  social  being 
— those  general  ideas  which  govern  his  everyday  atti- 
tude toward  his  fellow-men  and  his  prevailing  view  of 
himself.  In  one  direction  they  lay  upon  us  the  bonds 
of  what  we  call  etiquette,  i.  e.,  the  duty  of  considering 
the  habits  and  feelings  of  those  around  us — and  in 
another  direction  they  throttle  us  with  what  we  call 
morality — i.  e.,  the  rules  which  protect  the  life  and 
property  of  those  around  us.  But,  as  Dr.  Parsons 
shows,  the  boundary  between  etiquette  and  morality  is 


160  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

very  dimly  drawn,  and  it  is  often  impossible  to  say 
of  a  given  action  whether  it  is  downright  immoral  or 
merely  a  breach  of  the  punctilio.  Even  when  the 
moral  law  is  plainly  running,  considerations  of  mere 
amenity  and  politeness  may  still  make  themselves  felt. 
Thus,  as  Dr.  Parsons  points  out,  there  is  even  an  eti- 
quette of  adultery.  "The  ami  de  la  famille  vows  not 
to  kiss  his  mistress  in  her  husband's  house" — not  in 
fear,  but  "as  an  expression  of  conjugal  considera- 
tion," as  a  sign  that  he  has  not  forgotten  the  thought- 
fulness  expected  of  a  gentleman.  And  in  this  deli- 
cate field,  as  might  be  expected,  the  differences  in 
racial  attitudes  are  almost  diametrical.  The  English- 
man, surprising -his  wife  with  a  lover,  sues  the  rogue 
for  damages  and  has  public  opinion  behind  him,  but 
for  an  American  to  do  it  would  be  for  him  to  lose 
caste  at  once  and  forever.  The  plain  and  only  duty 
of  the  American  is  to  open  upon  the  fellow  with  artil- 
lery, hitting  him  if  the  scene  is  south  of  the  Potomac 
and  missing  him  if  it  is  above. 

I  confess  to  an  endless  interest  in  such  puzzling 
niceties,  and  to  much  curiosity  as  to  their  origins  and 
meaning.  Why  do  we  Americans  take  off  our  hats 
when  we  meet  a  flapper  on  the  street,  and  yet  stand 
covered  before  a  male  of  the  highest  eminence?  A 
Continental  would  regard  this  last  as  boorish  to  the 
last  degree;  in  greeting  any  equal  or  superior,  male 
or  female,  actual  or  merely  conventional,  he  lifts  his 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE  161 
head-piece.  Why  does  it  strike  us  as  ludicrous  to  see 
a  man  in  dress  clothes  before  6  p.  m.?  The  Conti- 
nental puts  them  on  whenever  he  has  a  solemn  visit  to 
make,  whether  the  hour  be  six  or  noon.  Why  do  we 
regard  it  as  indecent  to  tuck  the  napkin  between  the 
waistcoat  buttons — or  into  the  neck! — at  meals?  The 
Frenchman  does  it  without  thought  of  crime.  So  does 
the  Italian.  So  does  the  German.  All  three  are 
punctilious  men — far  more  so,  indeed,  than  we  are. 
Why  do  we  snicker  at  the  man  who  wears  a  wedding 
ring?  Most  Continentals  would  stare  askance  at  the 
husband  who  didn't.  Why  is  it  bad  manners  in  Eu- 
rope and  America  to  ask  a  stranger  his  or  her  age,  and 
a  friendly  attention  in  China?  Why  do  we  regard  it 
as  absurd  to  distinguish  a  woman  by  her  husband's 
title — e.  g.,  Mrs.  Judge  Jones,  Mrs.  Professor  Smith? 
In  Teutonic  and  Scandinavian  Europe  the  omission  of 
the  title  would  be  looked  upon  as  an  affront. 

Such  fine  distinctions,  so  ardently  supported,  raise 
many  interesting  questions,  but  the  attempt  to  answer 
them  quickly  gets  one  bogged.  Several  years  ago  I 
ventured  to  lift  a  sad  voice  against  a  custom  common 
in  America :  that  of  married  men,  in  speaking  of  their 
wives,  employing  the  full  panoply  of  "Mrs.  Brown." 
It  was  my  contention — supported,  I  thought,  by  logi- 
cal considerations  of  the  loftiest  order — that  a  hus- 
band, in  speaking  of  his  wife  to  his  equals,  should  say 
"my  wife" — that  the  more  formal  mode  of  designa- 


162  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

tion  should  be  reserved  for  inferiors  and  for  strangers 
of  undetermined  position.  This  contention,  some- 
what to  my  surprise,  was  vigorously  combated  by 
various  volunteer  experts.  At  first  they  rested  their 
case  upon  the  mere  authority  of  custom,  forgetting 
that  this  custom  was  by  no  means  universal.  But 
finally  one  of  them  came  forward  with  a  more  analyti- 
cal and  cogent  defense — the  defense,  to  wit,  that 
"my  wife"  connoted  proprietorship  and  was  thus  of- 
fensive to  a  wife's  amour  propre.  But  what  of  "my 
sister"  and  "my  mother"?  Surely  it  is  nowhere  the 
custom  for  a  man,  addressing  an  equal,  to  speak  of  his 
sister  as  "Miss  Smith."  .  .  .  The  discussion,  how- 
ever, came  to  nothing.  It  was  impossible  to  carry  it 
on  logically.  The  essence  of  all  such  inquiries  lies 
in  the  discovery  that  there  is  a  force  within  the  liver 
and  lights  of  man  that  is  infinitely  more  potent  than 
logic.  His  reflections,  perhaps,  may  take  on  intel- 
lectually recognizable  forms,  but  they  seldom  lead  to 
intellectually  recognizable  conclusions. 

Nevertheless,  Dr.  Parsons  offers  something  in  her 
book  that  may  conceivably  help  to  a  better  under- 
standing of  them,  and  that  is  the  doctrine  that  the 
strange  persistence  of  these  rubber-stamp  ideas,  often 
unintelligible  and  sometimes  plainly  absurd,  is  due 
to  fear,  and  that  this  fear  is  the  product  of  a  very  real 
danger.  The  safety  of  human  society  lies  in  the  as- 
sumption that  every  individual  composing  it,   in  a 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE  163 
given  situation,  will  act  in  a  manner  hitherto  approved 
as  seemly.  That  is  to  say,  he  is  expected  to  react  to 
his  environment  according  to  a  fixed  pattern,  not 
necessarily  because  that  pattern  is  tite  best  imaginable, 
but  simply  because  it  is  determined  and  understood. 
If  he  fails  to  do  so,  if  he  reacts  in  a  novel  manner — 
conducive,  perhaps,  to  his  better  advantage  or  to  what 
he  thinks  is  his  better  advantage — then  he  disappoints 
the  expectation  of  those  around  him,  and  forces  them 
to  meet  the  new  situation  he  has  created  by  the  exer- 
cise of  independent  thought.  Such  independent 
thought,  to  a  good  many  men,  is  quite  impossible,  and 
to  the  overwhelming  majority  of  men,  extremely  pain- 
ful. "To  all  of  us,"  says  Dr.  Parsons,  "to  the  animal, 
to  the  savage  and  to  the  civilized  being,  few  demands 
are  as  uncomfortable,  .  .  .  disquieting  or  fearful,  as 
the  call  to  innovate.  .  .  .  Adaptations  we  all  of  us 
dislike  or  hate.  We  dodge  or  shirk  them  as  best  we 
may."  And  the  man  who  compels  us  to  make  them 
against  our  wills  we  punish  by  withdrawing  from  him 
that  understanding  and  friendliness  which  he,  in  turn, 
looks  for  and  counts  upon.  In  other  words,  we  set 
him  apart  as  one  who  is  anti-social  and  not  to  be  dealt 
with,  and  according  as  his  rebellion  has  been  small  or 
great,  we  call  him  a  boor  or  a  criminal. 

This  distrust  of  the  unknown,  this  fear  of  doing 
something  unusual,  is  probably  at  the  bottom  of  many 
ideas  and  institutions  that  are  commonly  credited  to 


164  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

other  motives.  For  example,  monogamy.  The  or- 
thodox explanation  of  monogamy  is  that  it  is  a  mani- 
festation of  the  desire  to  have  and  to  hold  property — 
that  the  husband  defends  his  solitary  right  to  his  wife, 
even  at  the  cost  of  his  own  freedom,  because  she  is  the 
pearl  among  his  chattels.  But  Dr.  Parsons  argues, 
and  with  a  good  deal  of  plausibility,  that  the  real 
moving  force,  both  in  the  husband  and  the  wife,  may 
be  merely  the  force  of  habit,  the  antipathy  to  experi- 
ment and  innovation.  It  is  easier  and  safer  to  stick 
to  the  one  wife  than  to  risk  adventures  with  another 
wife — and  the  immense  social  pressure  that  I  have 
just  described  is  all  on  the  side  of  sticking.  More- 
over, the  indulgence  of  a  habit  automatically  strength- 
ens its  bonds.  What  we  have  done  once  or  thought 
once,  we  are  more  apt  than  we  were  before  to  do  and 
think  again.  Or,  as  the  late  Prof.  William  James  put 
it,  "the  selection  of  a  particular  hole  to  live  in,  of  a 
particular  mate,  ...  a  particular  anything,  in  short, 
out  of  a  possible  multitude  .  .  .  carries  with  it  an 
insensibility  to  other  opportunities  and  occasions — an 
insensibility  which  can  only  be  described  physiologi- 
cally as  an  inhibition  of  new  impulses  by  the  habit  of 
old  ones  already  formed.  The  possession  of  homes 
and  wives  of  our  own  makes  us  strangely  insensible  to 
the  charms  of  other  people.  .  .  .  The  original  im- 
pulse which  got  us  homes,  wives,  .  .  .  seems  to  ex- 
haust itself  in  its  first  achievements  and  to  leave  no 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE     165 

surplus  energy  for  reacting  on  new  cases."  Thus  the 
benedict  looks  no  more  on  women  (at  least  for  a 
while),  and  the  post-honeymoon  bride,  as  the  late 
David  Graham  Phillips  once  told  us,  neglects  the 
bedizenments  which  got  her  a  man. 

In  view  of  the  popular  or  general  character  of  most 
of  the  taboos  which  put  a  brake  upon  personal  liberty 
in  thought  and  action — that  is  to  say,  in  view  of  their 
enforcement  by  people  in  the  mass,  and  not  by  defi- 
nite specialists  in  conduct — it  is  quite  natural  to  find 
that  they  are  of  extra  force  in  democratic  societies, 
for  it  is  the  distinguishing  mark  of  democratic  socie- 
ties that  they  exalt  the  powers  of  the  majority  almost 
infinitely,  and  tend  to  deny  the  minority  any  rights 
whatever.  Under  a  society  dominated  by  a  small 
caste  the  revolutionist  in  custom,  despite  the  axiom  to 
the  contrary,  has  a  relatively  easy  time  of  it,  for  the 
persons  whose  approval  he  seeks  for  his  innovation 
are  relatively  few  in  number,  and  most  of  them  are 
already  habituated  to  more  or  less  intelligible  and 
independent  thinking.  But  under  a  democracy  he  is 
opposed  by  a  horde  so  vast  that  it  is  a  practical  im- 
possibility for  him,  without  complex  and  expensive 
machinery,  to  reach  and  convince  all  of  its  members, 
and  even  if  he  could  reach  them  he  would  find  most 
of  them  quite  incapable  of  rising  out  of  their  accus- 
tomed grooves.  They  cannot  understand  innovations 
that  are  genuinely  novel  and  they  don't  want  to  under- 


166  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

stand  them;  their  one  desire  is  to  put  them  down. 
Even  at  this  late  day,  with  enlightenment  raging 
through  the  republic  like  a  pestilence,  it  would  cost 
the  average  Southern  or  Middle  Western  Congress- 
man his  seat  if  he  appeared  among  his  constituents  in 
spats,  or  wearing  a  wrist-watch.  And  if  a  Justice  of 
the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States,  however 
gigantic  his  learning  and  his  juridic  rectitude,  were 
taken  in  crim.  con.  with  the  wife  of  a  Senator,  he 
would  be  destroyed  instanter.  And  if,  suddenly  re- 
volting against  the  democratic  idea,  he  were  to  pro- 
pose, however  gingerly,  its  abandonment,  he  would  be 
destroyed  with  the  same  dispatch. 

But  how,  then,  explain  the  fact  that  the  populace  is 
constantly  ravished  and  set  aflame  by  fresh  brigades 
of  moral,  political  and  sociological  revolutionists — 
that  it  is  forever  playing  the  eager  victim  to  new 
mountebanks?  The  explanation  lies  in  the  simple 
circumstance  that  these  performers  upon  the  public 
midriff  are  always  careful  to  ladle  out  nothing  ac- 
tually new,  and  hence  nothing  incomprehensible, 
alarming  and  accursed.  What  they  offer  is  always 
the  same  old  panacea  with  an  extra-gaudy  label — the 
tried,  tasted  and  much-loved  dose,  the  colic  cure  that 
mother  used  to  make.  Superficially,  the  United 
States  seems  to  suffer  from  an  endless  and  astound- 
ing neophilism;  actually  all  its  thinking  is  done 
within  the  boundaries  of  a  very  small  group  of  politi- 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE     167 

cal,  economic  and  religious  ideas,  most  of  them  un- 
sound. For  example,  there  is  the  fundamental  idea 
of  democracy — the  idea  that  all  political  power  should 
remain  in  the  hands  of  the  populace,  that  its  exercise 
by  superior  men  is  intrinsically  immoral.  Out  of 
this  idea  spring  innumerable  notions  and  crazes  that 
are  no  more,  at  bottom,  than  restatements  of  it  in  sen- 
timental terms:  rotation  in  office,  direct  elections,  the 
initiative  and  referendum,  the  recall,  the  popular  pri- 
mary, and  so  on.  Again,  there  is  the  primary  doctrine 
that  the  possession  of  great  wealth  is  a  crime — a  doc- 
trine half  a  religious  heritage  and  half  the  product  of 
mere  mob  envy.  Out  of  it  have  come  free  silver, 
trust-busting,  government  ownership,  muck-raking, 
Populism,  Bleaseism,  Progressivism,  the  milder  forms 
of  Socialism,  the  whole  gasconade  of  "reform"  poli- 
tics. 'Yet  again,  there  is  the  ineradicable  peasant 
suspicion  of  the  man  who  is  having  a  better  time  in 
the  world — a  suspicion  grounded,  like  the  foregoing, 
partly  upon  undisguised  envy  and  partly  upon  archaic 
and  barbaric  religious  taboos.  Out  of  it  have  come 
all  the  glittering  pearls  of  the  uplift,  from  Abolition 
to  Prohibition,  and  from  the  crusade  against  horse- 
racing  to  the  Mann  Act.  The  whole  political  history 
of  the  United  States  is  a  history  of  these  three  ideas. 
There  has  never  been  an  issue  before  the  people  that 
could  not  be  translated  into  one  or  another  of  them. 
What  is  more,  they  have  also  colored  the  fundamental 


168  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

philosophical  (and  particularly  epistemological)  doc- 
trines of  the  American  people,  and  their  moral  theory, 
and  even  their  foreign  relations.  The  late  war,  very 
unpopular  at  the  start,  was  "sold"  to  them,  as  the  ad- 
vertising phrase  has  it,  by  representing  it  as  a  cam- 
paign for  the  salvation  of  democracy,  half  religious 
and  wholly  altruistic.  So  represented  to  them,  they 
embraced  it;  represented  as  the  highly  obscure  and 
complex  thing  it  actually  was,  it  would  have  been 
beyond  their  comprehension,  and  hence  abhorrent  to 
them. 

Outside  this  circle  of  their  elemental  convictions 
they  are  quite  incapable  of  rational  thought.  One  is 
not  surprised  to  hear  of  Bismarck,  a  thorough  royalist, 
discussing  democracy  with  calm  and  fairness,  but  it 
would  be  unimaginable  for  the  American  people,  or 
for  any  other  democratic  people,  to  discuss  royalism 
in  the  same  manner:  it  would  take  a  cataclysm  to 
bring  them  to  any  such  violation  of  their  mental  habits. 
When  such  a  cataclysm  occurs,  they  embrace  the  new 
ideas  that  are  its  fruits  with  the  same  adamantine  firm- 
ness. One  year  before  the  French  Revolution,  dis- 
obedience to  the  king  was  unthinkable  to  the  average 
Frenchman;  only  a  few  daringly  immoral  men  cher- 
ished the  notion.  But  one  year  after  the  fall  of  the 
Bastile,  obedience  to  the  king  was  equally  unthink- 
able. The  Russian  Bolsheviki,  whose  doings  have 
furnished  a  great  deal  of  immensely  interesting  mate- 


THE  GENEALOGY  OF  ETIQUETTE      169 

rial  to  the  student  of  popular  psychology,  put  the 
principle  into  plain  words.  Once  they  were  in  the 
saddle,  they  decreed  the  abolition  of  the  old  imperial 
censorship  and  announced  that  speech  would  be  free 
henceforth — but  only  so  long  as  it  kept  within  the 
bounds  of  the  Bolshevist  revelation!  In  other  words, 
any  citizen  was  free  to  think  and  speak  whatever  he 
pleased — but  only  so  long  as  it  did  not  violate  certain 
fundamental  ideas.  This  is  precisely  the  sort  of  free- 
dom that  has  prevailed  in  the  United  States  since  the 
first  days.  It  is  the  only  sort  of  freedom  comprehen- 
sible to  the  average  man.  It  accurately  reveals  his 
constitutional  inability  to  shake  himself  free  from  the 
illogical  and  often  quite  unintelligible  prejudices,  in- 
stincts and  mental  vices  that  condition  ninety  per  cent, 
of  all  his  thinking.  .  .  . 

But  here  I  wander  into  political  speculation  and  no 
doubt  stand  in  contumacy  of  some  statute  of  Congress. 
Dr.  Parsons  avoids  politics  in  her  very  interesting 
book.  She  confines  herself  to  the  purely  social  rela- 
tions, e.  g.,  between  man  and  woman,  parent  and  child, 
host  and  guest,  master  and  servant.  The  facts  she 
offers  are  vastly  interesting,  and  their  discovery  and 
coordination  reveal  a  tremendous  industry,  but  of 
even  greater  interest  are  the  facts  that  lie  over  the 
margin  of  her  inquiry.  Here  is  a  golden  opportu- 
nity for  other  investigators:  I  often  wonder  that  the 
field  is  so  little  explored.     Perhaps  the  Freudians, 


*S 


170  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

once  they  get  rid  of  their  sexual  obsession,  will  enter 
it  and  chart  it.  No  doubt  the  inferiority  complex  de- 
scribed by  Prof.  Dr.  Alfred  Adler  will  one  day  pro- 
vide an  intelligible  explanation  of  many  of  the  puz- 
zling phenomena  of  mob  thinking.  In  the  work  of 
Prof.  Dr.  Freud  himself  there  is,  perhaps,  a  clew  to 
the  origin  and  anatomy  of  Puritanism,  that  worst  of 
intellectual  nephritises.  I  live  in  hope  that  the  Freud- 
ians will  fall  upon  the  business  without  much  further 
delay.  Why  do  otherwise  sane  men  believe  in  spirits? 
What  is  the  genesis  of  the  American  axiom  that  the 
fine  arts  are  unmanly?  What  is  the  precise  machin- 
ery of  the  process  called  falling  in  love?  Why  do 
people  believe  newspapers?  .  .  .  Let  there  be  light! 


XIII.   THE   AMERICAN   MAGAZINE 

T  is  astonishing,  considering  the  enormous  influ- 
ence of  the  popular  magazine  upon  American 
literature,  such  as  it  is,  that  there  is  but  one  book 
in  type  upon  magazine  history  in  the  republic.  That 
lone  volume  is  "The  Magazine  in  America,"  by  Prof. 
Dr.  Algernon  Tassin,  a  learned  birchman  of  the  great 
university  of  Columbia,  and  it  is  so  badly  written  that 
the  interest  of  its  matter  is  almost  concealed — almost, 
but  fortunately  not  quite.  The  professor,  in  fact, 
puts  English  to  paper  with  all  the  traditional  dullness 
of  his  flatulent  order,  and,  as  usual,  he  is  most  hor- 
ribly dull  when  he  is  trying  most  kittenishly  to  be 
lively.  I  spare  you  examples  of  his  writing;  if  you 
know  the  lady  essayists  of  the  United  States,  and  their 
academic  imitators  in  pantaloons,  you  know  the  sort 
of  arch  and  whimsical  jocosity  he  ladles  out.  But,  as 
I  have  hinted,  there  is  something  worth  attending  to 
in  his  story,  for  all  the  defects  of  its  presentation,  and 
so  his  book  is  not  to  be  sniffed  at.  He  has,  at  all 
events,  brought  together  a  great  mass  of  scattered  and 
concealed  facts,  and  arranged  them  conveniently  for 

whoever  deals  with  them  next.     The  job  was  plainly 

171 


172  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

a  long  and  laborious  one,  and  rasping  to  the  higher 
cerebral  centers.  The  historian  had  to  make  his 
mole-like  way  through  the  endless  files  of  old  and 
stupid  magazines;  he  had  to  read  the  insipid  biog- 
raphies and  autobiographies  of  dead  and  forgotten 
editors,  many  of  them  college  professors,  preachers 
out  of  work,  pre-historic  uplifters  and  bad  poets;  he 
had  to  sort  out  the  facts  from  the  fancies  of  such 
incurable  liars  as  Griswold;  he  had  to  hack  and  blast 
a  path  across  a  virgin  wilderness.  The  thing  was 
worth  doing,  and,  as  I  say,  it  has  been  done  with  com- 
mendable pertinacity. 

Considering  the  noisiness  of  the  American  maga- 
zines of  to-day,  it  is  rather  instructive  to  glance  back  at 
the  timorous  and  bloodless  quality  of  their  progenit- 
ors. All  of  the  early  ones,  when  they  were  not  simply 
monthly  newspapers  or  almanacs,  were  depressingly 
"literary"  in  tone,  and  dealt  chiefly  in  stupid  poetry, 
silly  essays  and  artificial  fiction.  The  one  great  fear 
of  their  editors  seems  to  have  been  that  of  offending 
some  one;  all  of  the  pioneer  prospectuses  were  full  of 
assurances  that  nothing  would  be  printed  which  even 
"the  most  fastidious"  could  object  to.  Literature,  in 
those  days, — say  from  1830  to  1860 — was  almost 
completely  cut  off  from  contemporary  life.  It  mir- 
rored, not  the  struggle  for  existence,  so  fierce  and 
dramatic  in  the  new  nation,  but  the  pallid  reflections 
of   poetasters,    self-advertising    clergymen,    sissified 


THE  AMERICAN  MAGAZINE  173 

"gentlemen  of  taste,"  and  other  such  donkeys.  Poe 
waded  into  these  literati  and  shook  them  up  a  bit,  but 
even  after  the  Civil  War  the  majority  of  them  con- 
tinued to  spin  pretty  cobwebs.  Edmund  Clarence 
Stedman  and  Donald  G.  Mitchell  were  excellent  speci- 
mens of  the  clan ;  its  last  survivor  was  the  lachrymose 
William  Winter.  The  "literature"  manufactured  by 
these  tear-squeezers,  though  often  enough  produced  in 
beer  cellars,  was  frankly  aimed  at  the  Young  Person. 
Its  main  purpose  was  to  avoid  giving  offense;  it 
breathed  a  heavy  and  oleaginous  piety,  a  snug  nice- 
ness,  a  sickening  sweetness.  It  is  as  dead  to-day  as 
Baalam's  ass. 

The  Atlantic  Monthly  was  set  up  by  men  in  revolt 
against  this  reign  of  mush,  as  Putnam's  had  been  a 
few  years  before,  but  the  business  of  reform  proved 
to  be  difficult  and  hazardous,  and  it  was  a  long  while 
before  a  healthier  breed  of  authors  could  be  devel- 
oped, and  a  public  for  them  found.  "There  is  not 
much  in  the  Atlantic,"  wrote  Charles  Eliot  Norton  to 
Lowell  in  1874,  "that  is  likely  to  be  read  twice  save 
by  its  writers,  and  this  is  what  the  great  public  likes. 
.  .  .  You  should  hear  Godkin  express  himself  in 
private  on  this  topic."  Harper  s  Magazine,  in  those 
days,  was  made  up  almost  wholly  of  cribbings  from 
England;  the  North  American  Review  had  sunk  into 
stodginess  and  imbecility;  Putnam's  was  dead,  or  dy- 
ing; the  Atlantic  had  yet  to  discover  Mark  Twain;  it 


174  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

was  the  era  of  Godey's  Lady's  Book.  The  new  note, 
so  long  awaited,  was  struck  at  last  by  Scribnefs,  now 
the  Century  (and  not  to  be  confused  with  the  Scrib- 
nefs of  to-day).  It  not  only  threw  all  the  old  tradi- 
tions overboard;  it  established  new  traditions  al- 
most at  once.  For  the  first  time  a  great  maga- 
zine began  to  take  notice  of  the  daily  life  of  the  Ameri- 
can people.  It  started  off  with  a  truly  remarkable 
series  of  articles  on  the  Civil  War;  it  plunged  into 
contemporary  politics;  it  eagerly  sought  out  and  en- 
couraged new  writers;  it  began  printing  decent  pic- 
tures instead  of  the  old  chromos;  it  forced  itself,  by 
the  sheer  originality  and  enterprise  of  its  editing, 
upon  the  public  attention.  American  literature  owes 
more  to  the  Century  than  to  any  other  magazine,  and 
perhaps  American  thinking  owes  almost  as  much.  It 
was  the  first  "literary"  periodical  to  arrest  and  in- 
terest the  really  first-class  men  of  the  country.  It 
beat  the  Atlantic  because  it  wasn't  burdened  with  the 
Atlantic  s  decaying  cargo  of  Boston  Brahmins.  It 
beat  all  the  others  because  it  was  infinitely  and  ob- 
viously better.  Almost  everything  that  is  good  in  the 
American  magazine  of  to-day,  almost  everything  that 
sets  it  above  the  English  magazine  or  the  Continental 
magazine,  stems  from  the  Century. 

At  the  moment,  of  course,  it  holds  no  such  clear 
field;  perhaps  it  has  served  its  function  and  is  ready 
for  a  placid  old  age.     The  thing  that  displaced  it  was 


THE  AMERICAN  MAGAZINE  175 

the  yellow  magazine  of  the  McClures  type — a  variety 
of  magazine  which  surpassed  it  in  the  race  for  cir- 
culation by  exaggerating  and  vulgarizing  all  its  mer- 
its. Dr.  Tassin  seems  to  think,  with  William  Archer, 
that  S.  S.  McClure  was  the  inventor  of  this  type,  but 
the  truth  is  that  its  real  father  was  the  unknown  orig- 
inator of  the  Sunday  supplement.  What  McClure 
— a  shrewd  literary  bagman — did  was  to  apply  the 
sensational  methods  of  the  cheap  newspaper  to  a  new 
and  cheap  magazine.  Yellow  journalism  was  rising 
and  he  went  in  on  the  tide.  The  satanic  Hearst  was 
getting  on  his  legs  at  the  same  time,  and  I  daresay 
that  the  muck-raking  magazines,  even  in  their  palmy 
days,  followed  him  a  good  deal  more  than  they  led 
him.  McClure  and  the  imitators  of  McClure  bor- 
rowed his  adept  thumping  of  the  tom-tom;  Munsey 
and  the  imitators  of  Munsey  borrowed  his  mush. 
McClure  s  and  Everybody 's,  even  when  they  had  the 
whole  nation  by  the  ears,  did  little  save  repeat  in 
solemn,  awful  tones  what  Hearst  had  said  before. 
As  for  Munsey' s,  at  the  height  of  its  circulation,  it  was 
little  more  than  a  Sunday  "magazine  section"  on 
smooth  paper,  and  with  somewhat  clearer  half-tones 
than  Hearst  could  print.  Nearly  all  the  genuinely 
original  ideas  of  these  Yankee  Harmsworths  of  yes- 
terday turned  out  badly.  John  Brisben  Walker,  with 
the  Cosmopolitan,  tried  to  make  his  magazine  a  sort 
of  national  university,  and  it  went  to  pot.     Ridgway, 


176  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

of  Everybody's,  planned  a  weekly  to  be  published  in 
a  dozen  cities  simultaneously,  and  lost  a  fortune  try- 
ing to  establish  it.  McClure,  facing  a  situation  to 
be  described  presently,  couldn't  manage  it,  and  his 
magazine  got  away  from  him.  As  for  Munsey,  there 
are  many  wrecks  behind  him;  he  is  forever  experi- 
menting boldly  and  failing  gloriously.  Even  his 
claim  to  have  invented  the  all-fiction  magazine  is  open 
to  caveat;  there  were  probably  plenty  of  such  things, 
in  substance  if  not  in  name,  before  the  Argosy. 
Hearst,  the  teacher  of  them  all,  now  openly  holds  the 
place  that  belongs  to  him.  He  has  galvanized  the 
corpse  of  the  old  Cosmopolitan  into  a  great  success,  he 
has  distanced  all  rivals  with  Hearst's,  he  has  beaten 
the  English  on  their  own  ground  with  Nash's,  and  he 
has  rehabilitated  various  lesser  magazines.  More, 
he  has  forced  the  other  magazine  publishers  to  imi- 
tate him.  A  glance  at  McClure' s  to-day  offers  all  the 
proof  that  is  needed  of  his  influence  upon  his  in- 
feriors. 

Dr.  Tassin,  apparently  in  fear  of  making  his  book 
too  nearly  good,  halts  his  chronicle  at  its  most  inter- 
esting point,  for  he  says  nothing  of  what  has  gone  on 
since  1900 — and  very  much,  indeed,  has  gone  on 
since  1900.  For  one  thing,  the  Saturday  Evening 
Post  has  made  its  unparalleled  success,  created  its  new 
type  of  American  literature  for  department  store  buy- 
ers and  shoe  drummers,  and  bred  its  school  of  brisk, 


THE  AMERICAN  MAGAZINE  111 

business-like,  high-speed  authors.  For  another  thing, 
the  Ladies'  Home  Journal,  once  supreme  in  its  field, 
has  seen  the  rise  of  a  swarm  of  imitators,  some  of 
them  very  prosperous.  For  a  third  thing,  the  all- 
fiction  magazine  of  Munsey,  Robert  Bonner  and  Street 
&  Smith  has  degenerated  into  so  dubious  a  hussy  that 
Munsey,  a  very  moral  man,  must  blush  every  time  he 
thinks  of  it.  For  a  fourth  thing,  the  moving-picture 
craze  has  created  an  entirely  new  type  of  magazine, 
and  it  has  elbowed  many  other  types  from  the  stands. 
And  for  a  fifth  thing,  to  make  an  end,  the  muck- 
raking magazine  has  blown  up  and  is  no  more. 

Why  this  last?  Have  all  the  possible  candidates 
for  the  rake  been  raked?  Is  there  no  longer  any 
taste  for  scandal  in  the  popular  breast?  I  have 
heard  endless  discussion  of  these  questions  and  many 
ingenious  answers,  but  all  of  them  fail  to  answer. 
In  this  emergency  I  offer  one  of  my  own.  It  is  this: 
that  the  muck-raking  magazine  came  to  grief,  not  be- 
cause the  public  tired  of  muck-raking,  but  because  the 
muck-raking  that  it  began  with  succeeded.  That  is 
to  say,  the  villains  so  long  belabored  by  the  Steffenses, 
the  Tarbells  and  the  Phillipses  were  either  driven  from 
the  national  scene  or  forced  (at  least  temporarily) 
into  rectitude.  Worse,  their  places  in  public  life 
were  largely  taken  by  nominees  whose  chemical  purity 
was  guaranteed  by  these  same  magazines,  and  so  the 
latter  found  their  occupation  gone  and  their  follow- 


178  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

ing  with  it.  The  great  masses  of  the  plain  people, 
eager  to  swallow  denunciation  in  horse-doctor  doses, 
gagged  at  the  first  spoonful  of  praise.  They  chortled 
and  read  on  when  Aldrich,  Boss  Cox,  Gas  Addicks, 
John  D.  Rockefeller  and  the  other  bugaboos  of  the  time 
were  belabored  every  month,  but  they  promptly  sick- 
ened and  went  elsewhere  when  Judge  Ben  B.  Lindsey, 
Francis  J.  Heney,  Governor  Folk  and  the  rest  of  the 
bogus  saints  began  to  be  hymned. 

The  same  phenomenon  is  constantly  witnessed  upon 
the  lower  level  of  daily  journalism.  Let  a  vociferous 
"reform"  newspaper  overthrow  the  old  gang  and  elect 
its  own  candidates,  and  at  once  it  is  in  a  perilous  con- 
dition. Its  stock  in  trade  is  gone.  It  can  no  longer 
give  a  good  show — within  the  popular  meaning  of  a 
good  show.  For  what  the  public  wants  eternally — 
at  least  the  American  public — is  rough  work.  It  de- 
lights in  vituperation.  It  revels  in  scandal.  It  is 
always  on  the  side  of  the  man  or  journal  making  the 
charges,  no  matter  how  slight  the  probability  that  the 
accused  is  guilty.  The  late  Roosevelt,  perhaps  one 
of  the  greatest  rabble-rousers  the  world  has  ever  seen, 
was  privy  to  this  fact,  and  made  it  the  corner-stone  of 
his  singularly  cynical  and  effective  politics.  He  was 
forever  calling  names,  making  accusations,  unearth- 
ing and  denouncing  demons.  Dr.  Wilson,  a  per- 
former of  scarcely  less  talent,  has  sought  to  pursue 
the  same  plan,  with  varying  fidelity  and  success.     He 


THE  AMERICAN  MAGAZINE  179 

was  a  popular  hero  so  long  as  he  confined  himself  to 
reviling  men  and  things — the  Hell  Hounds  of  Plutoc- 
racy, the  Socialists,  the  Kaiser,  the  Irish,  the  Senate 
minority.  But  the  moment  he  found  himself  on  the 
side  of  the  defense,  he  began  to  wobble,  just  as  Roose- 
velt before  him  had  begun  to  wobble  when  he  found 
himself  burdened  with  the  intricate  constructive  pro- 
gram of  the  Progressives.  Roosevelt  shook  himself 
free  by  deserting  the  Progressives,  but  Wilson  found 
it  impossible  to  get  rid  of  his  League  of  Nations,  and 
so,  for  awhile  at  least,  he  presented  a  quite  typical 
picture  of  a  muck-raker  ham-strung  by  blows  from  the 
wrong  end  of  the  rake. 

That  the  old  appetite  for  bloody  shows  is  not  dead 
but  only  sleepeth  is  well  exhibited  by  the  recent  re- 
vival of  the  weekly  of  opinion.  Ten  years  ago  the 
weekly  seemed  to  be  absolutely  extinct;  even  the  Na- 
tion survived  only  as  a  half -forgotten  appendage  of 
the  Evening  Post.  Then,  of  a  sudden,  the  alliance 
was  broken,  the  Evening  Post  succumbed  to  Wall 
Street,  the  Nation  started  on  an  independent  course — 
and  straightway  made  a  great  success.  And  why? 
Simply  because  it  began  breaking  heads — not  the  old 
heads  of  the  McClures  era,  of  course,  but  neverthe- 
less heads  salient  enough  to  make  excellent  targets. 
For  years  it  had  been  moribund;  no  one  read  it  save 
a  dwindling  company  of  old  men;  its  influence  gradu- 
ally approached  nil.     But  by  the  elementary  device  of 


180  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

switching  from  mild  expostulation  to  violent  and  ef- 
fective denunciation  it  made  a  new  public  almost 
over-night,  and  is  now  very  widely  read,  extensively 
quoted  and  increasingly  heeded.  ...  I  often  wonder 
that  so  few  publishers  of  periodicals  seem  aware  of 
the  psychological  principle  here  exposed.  It  is 
known  to  every  newspaper  publisher  of  the  slightest 
professional  intelligence;  all  successful  newspapers 
are  ceaselessly  querulous  and  bellicose.  They  never 
defend  any  one  or  anything  if  they  can  help  it;  if  the 
job  is  forced  upon  them,  they  tackle  it  by  denouncing 
some  one  or  something  else.  The  plan  never  fails. 
Turn  to  the  moving-picture  trade  magazines:  the  most 
prosperous  of  them  is  given  over,  in  the  main,  to  bitter 
attacks  upon  new  films.  Come  back  to  daily  journal- 
ism. The  New  York  Tribune,  a  decaying  paper,  well 
nigh  rehabilitated  itself  by  attacking  Hearst,  the  clev- 
erest muck-raker  of  them  all.  For  a  moment,  ap- 
parently dismayed,  he  attempted  a  defense  of  him- 
self— and  came  near  falling  into  actual  disaster. 
Then,  recovering  his  old  form,  he  began  a  whole  series 
of  counter  attacks  and  cover  attacks,  and  in  six  months 
he  was  safe  and  sound  again.  .  .  . 


XIV.   THE    ULSTER   POLONIUS 

A  GOOD  half  of  the  humor  of  the  late  Mark 
Twain  consisted  of  admitting  frankly  the 
possession  of  vices  and  weaknesses  that  all 
of  us  have  and  few  of  us  care  to  acknowledge.  Prac- 
tically all  of  the  sagacity  of  George  Bernard  Shaw 
consists  of  bellowing  vociferously  what  every  one 
knows.  I  think  I  am  as  well  acquainted  with  his 
works,  both  hortatory  and  dramatic,  as  the  next  man. 
I  wrote  the  first  book  ever  devoted  to  a  discussion  of 
them,  and  I  read  them  pretty  steadily,  even  to-day, 
and  with  endless  enjoyment.  Yet,  so  far  as  I  know, 
I  have  never  found  an  original  idea  in  them — never  a 
single  statement  of  fact  or  opinion  that  was  not  an- 
teriorly familiar,  and  almost  commonplace.  Put  the 
thesis  of  any  of  his  plays  into  a  plain  proposition,  and 
I  doubt  that  you  could  find  a  literate  man  in  Christen- 
dom who  had  not  heard  it  before,  or  who  would  seri- 
ously dispute  it.  The  roots  of  each  one  of  them  are 
in  platitude;  the  roots  of  every  effective  stage-play 
are  in  platitude;  that  a  dramatist  is  inevitably  a  plati- 
tudinarian is  itself  a  platitude  double  damned.  But 
Shaw  clings  to  the  obvious  even  when  he  is  not  ham- 
pered by  the  suffocating  conventions  of  the  stage. 

181 


182  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

His  Fabian  tracts  and  his  pamphlets  on  the  war  are 
veritable  compendiums  of  the  undeniable;  what  is 
seriously  stated  in  them  is  quite  beyond  logical  dis- 
pute. They  have  excited  a  great  deal  of  ire,  they 
have  brought  down  upon  him  a  great  deal  of  amusing 
abuse,  but  I  have  yet  to  hear  of  any  one  actually  con- 
troverting them.  As  well  try  to  controvert  the  Co- 
pernican  astronomy.  They  are  as  bullet-proof  in  es- 
sence as  the  multiplication  table,  and  vastly  more 
bullet-proof  than  the  Ten  Commandments  or  the  Con- 
stitution of  the  United  States. 

Well,  then,  why  does  the  Ulsterman  kick  up  such 
a  pother?  Why  is  he  regarded  as  an  arch-heretic, 
almost  comparable  to  Galileo,  Nietzsche  or  Simon 
Magnus?  For  the  simplest  of  reasons.  Because  he 
practices  with  great  zest  and  skill  the  fine  art  of  ex- 
hibiting the  obvious  in  unexpected  and  terrifying 
lights — because  he  is  a  master  of  the  logical  trick  of 
so  matching  two  apparently  safe  premisses  that  they 
yield  an  incongruous  and  inconvenient  conclusion — 
above  all,  because  he  is  a  fellow  of  the  utmost  charm 
and  address,  quick-witted,  bold,  limber-tongued,  per- 
suasive, humorous,  iconoclastic,  ingratiating — in 
brief,  an  Irishman,  and  so  the  exact  antithesis  of  the 
solemn  Sassenachs  who  ordinarily  instruct  and  exhort 
us.  Turn  to  his  "Man  and  Superman,"  and  you  will 
see  the  whole  Shaw  machine  at  work.  What  he  starts 
out  with  is  the  self-evident  fact,  disputed  by  no  one 


THE  ULSTER  POLONIUS  183 

not  idiotic,  that  a  woman  has  vastly  more  to  gain  by 
marriage,  under  Christian  monogamy,  than  a  man. 
That  fact  is  as  old  as  monogamy  itself;  it  was,  I  dare- 
say,  the  admitted  basis  of  the  palace  revolution  which 
brought  monogamy  into  the  world.  But  now  comes 
Shaw  with  an  implication  that  the  sentimentality  of 
the  world  chooses  to  conceal — with  a  deduction 
plainly  resident  in  the  original  proposition,  but  kept 
in  safe  silence  there  by  a  preposterous  and  hypo- 
critical taboo — to  wit,  the  deduction  that  women  are 
well  aware  of  the  profit  that  marriage  yields  for  them, 
and  that  they  are  thus  much  more  eager  to  marry  than 
men  are,  and  ever  alert  to  take  the  lead  in  the  busi- 
ness. This  second  fact,  to  any  man  who  has  passed 
through  the  terrible  years  between  twenty-five  and 
forty,  is  as  plain  as  the  first,  but  by  a  sort  of  general 
consent  it  is  not  openly  stated.  Violate  that  general 
consent  and  you  are  guilty  of  scandalum  magnatum. 
Shaw  is  simply  one  who  is  guilty  of  scandalum  mag- 
natum habitually,  a  professional  criminal  in  that  de- 
partment. It  is  his  life  work  to  announce  the  ob- 
vious in  terms  of  the  scandalous. 

What  lies  under  the  horror  of  such  blabbing  is  the 
deepest  and  most  widespread  of  human  weaknesses, 
which  is  to  say,  intellectual  cowardice,  the  craven 
appetite  for  mental  ease  and  security,  the  fear  of 
thinking  things  out.  All  men  are  afflicted  by  it  more 
or  less;  not  even  the  most  courageous  and  frank  of 


184  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

men  likes  to  admit,  in  specific  terms,  that  his  wife  is 
fat,  or  that  she  seduced  him  to  the  altar  by  a  trans- 
parent trick,  or  that  their  joint  progeny  resemble  her 
brother  or  father,  and  are  thus  cads.  A  few  ex- 
traordinary heroes  of  logic  and  evidence  may  do  it 
occasionally,  but  only  occasionally.  The  average 
man  never  does  it  at  all.  He  is  eternally  in  fear  of 
what  he  knows  in  his  heart;  his  whole  life  is  made  up 
of  efforts  to  dodge  it  and  conceal  it;  he  is  always  run- 
ning away  from  what  passes  for  his  intelligence  and 
taking  refuge  in  what  pass  for  his  higher  feelings,  i.  e., 
his  stupidities,  his  delusions,  his  sentimentalities. 
Shaw  is  devoted  to  the  art  of  hauling  this  recreant 
fellow  up.  He  is  one  who,  for  purposes  of  sensation, 
often  for  the  mere  joy  of  outraging  the  tender- 
minded,  resolutely  and  mercilessly  thinks  things  out 
— sometimes  with  the  utmost  ingenuity  and  humor, 
but  often,  it  must  be  said,  in  the  same  muddled  way 
that  the  average  right-thinker  would  do  it  if  he  ever 
got  up  the  courage.  Remember  this  formula,  and 
all  of  the  fellow's  alleged  originality  becomes  no  more 
than  a  sort  of  bad-boy  audacity,  usually  in  bad  taste. 
He  drags  skeletons  from  their  closet  and  makes  them 
dance  obscenely — but  every  one,  of  course,  knew  that 
they  were  there  all  the  while.  He  would  produce  an 
excitement  of  exactly  the  same  kind  (though  perhaps 
superior  in  intensity)  if  he  should  walk  down  the 
Strand  bared  to  the  waist,  and  so  remind  the  shocked 


THE  ULSTER  POLONIUS  185 

Londoners  of  the  unquestioned  fact  (though  conven- 
tionally concealed  and  forgotten)  that  he  is  a  mam- 
mal, and  has  an  umbilicus. 

Turn  to  a  typical  play-and-preface  of  his  later 
canon,  say  "Androcles  and  the  Lion."  Here  the  com- 
plete Shaw  formula  is  exposed.  On  the  one  hand 
there  is  a  mass  of  platitudes;  on  the  other  hand  there 
is  the  air  of  a  peep-show.  On  the  one  hand  he  re- 
hearses facts  so  stale  that  even  Methodist  clergymen 
have  probably  heard  of  them;  on  the  other  hand  he 
states  them  so  scandalously  that  the  pious  get  all  of 
the  thrills  out  of  the  business  that  would  accompany  a 
view  of  the  rector  in  liquor  in  the  pulpit.  Here,  for 
example,  are  some  of  his  contentions: 

(a)  That  the  social  and  economic  doctrines  preached  by 
Jesus  were  indistinguishable  from  what  is  now  called 
Socialism. 

(b)  That  the  Pauline  transcendentalism  visible  in  the 
Acts  and  the  Epistles  differs  enormously  from  the  simple 
humanitarianism  set  forth  in  the  Four  Gospels. 

(c)  That  the  Christianity  on  tap  to-day  would  be  almost 
as  abhorrent  to  Jesus,  supposing  Him  returned  to  earth, 
as  the  theories  of  Nietzsche,  Hindenburg  or  Clemenceau, 
and  vastly  more  abhorrent  than  those  of  Emma  Goldman. 

(d)  That  the  rejection  of  the  Biblical  miracles,  and  even 
of  the  historical  credibility  of  the  Gospels,  by  no  means 
disposes  of  Christ  Himself. 

(e)  That  the  early  Christians  were  persecuted,  not  be- 
cause their  theology  was  regarded  as  unsound,  but  because 
their  public  conduct  constituted  a  nuisance. 


186  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

It  is  unnecessary  to  go  on.  Could  any  one  imagine 
a  more  abject  surrender  to  the  undeniable?  Would 
it  be  possible  to  reduce  the  German  exegesis  of  a  cen- 
tury and  a  half  to  a  more  depressing  series  of  plati- 
tudes? But  his  discussion  of  the  inconsistencies 
between  the  Four  Gospels  is  even  worse;  you  will 
find  all  of  its  points  set  forth  in  any  elemental  treatise 
upon  New  Testament  criticism — even  in  so  childish  a 
tract  as  Ramsden  Balmforth's.  He  actually  dishes 
up,  with  a  heavy  air  of  profundity,  the  news  that  there 
is  a  glaring  conflict  between  the  genealogy  of  Jesus  in 
Matthew  i,  1-17,  and  the  direct  claim  of  divine 
paternity  in  Matthew  i,  18.  More,  he.  breaks  out 
with  the  astounding  discovery  that  Jesus  was  a  good 
Jew,  and  that  Paul's  repudiation  of  circumcision 
(now  a  cardinal  article  of  the  so-called  Christian 
faith)  would  have  surprised  Him  and  perhaps  greatly 
shocked  Him.  The  whole  preface,  running  to  114 
pages,  is  made  up  of  just  such  shop-worn  stuff. 
Searching  it  from  end  to  end  with  eagle  eye,  I  have 
failed  to  find  a  single  fact  or  argument  that  was  not 
previously  familiar  to  me,  despite  the  circumstance 
that  I  ordinarily  give  little  attention  to  the  sacred 
sciences  and  thus  might  have  been  expected  to  be  sur- 
prised by  their  veriest  commonplaces. 

Nevertheless,  this  preface  makes  bouncing  reading 
— and  therein  lies  the  secret  of  the  continued  vogue  of 
Shaw.     He  has   a   large  and   extremely  uncommon 


THE  ULSTER  POLONIUS  187 

capacity  for  provocative  utterance;  lie  knows  how  to 
get  a  touch  of  bellicosity  into  the  most  banal  of  doc- 
trines; he  is  forever  on  tiptoe,  forever  challenging, 
forever  sforzando.  His  matter  may  be  from  the 
public  store,  even  from  the  public  junk-shop,  but  his 
manner  is  always  all  his  own.  The  tune  is  old,  but 
the  words  are  new.  Consider,  for  example,  his  dis- 
cussion of  the  personality  of  Jesus.  The  idea  is 
simple  and  obvious:  Jesus  was  not  a  long-faced 
prophet  of  evil,  like  John  the  Baptist,  nor  was  He  an 
ascetic,  or  a  mystic.  But  here  is  the  Shaw  way  of 
saying  it:  "He  was  .  .  .  what  we  call  an  artist  and 
a  Bohemian  in  His  manner  of  life."  The  fact  re- 
mains unchanged,  but  in  the  extravagant  statement  of 
it  there  is  a  shock  for  those  who  have  been  confusing 
the  sour  donkey  they  hear  of  a  Sunday  with  the 
tolerant,  likable  Man  they  profess  to  worship — and 
perhaps  there  is  even  a  genial  snicker  in  it  for  their 
betters.  So  with  his  treatment  of  the  Atonement. 
His  objections  to  it  are  time-worn,  but  suddenly  he 
gets  the  effect  of  novelty  by  pointing  out  the  quite 
manifest  fact  that  acceptance  of  it  is  apt  to  make  for 
weakness,  that  the  man  who  rejects  it  is  thrown  back 
upon  his  own  courage  and  circumspection,  and  is 
hence  stimulated  to  augment  them.  The  first  argu- 
ment— that  Jesus  was  of  free  and  easy  habits — is  so 
commonplace  that  I  have  heard  it  voiced  by  a  bishop. 
The  second  suggests  itself  so  naturally  that  I  myself 


\ 


188  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

once  employed  it  against  a  chance  Christian  en- 
countered in  a  Pullman  smoking-room.  This  Chris- 
tian was  at  first  shocked  as  he  might  have  been  by- 
reading  Shaw,  but  in  half  an  hour  he  was  confessing 
that  he  had  long  ago  thought  of  the  objection  himself, 
and  put  it  away  as  immoral.  I  well  remember  his 
fascinated  interest  as  I  showed  him  how  my  inability 
to  accept  the  doctrine  put  a  heavy  burden  of  moral 
responsibility  upon  me,  and  forced  me  to  be  more 
watchful  of  my  conduct  than  the  elect  of  God,  and 
so  robbed  me  of  many  pleasant  advantages  in  finance, 
the  dialectic  and  amour.  .  .  . 

A  double  jest  conceals  itself  in  the  Shaw  legend. 
The  first  half  of  it  I  have  already  disclosed.  The 
second  half  has  to  do  with  the  fact  that  Shaw  is  not 
at  all  the  wholesale  agnostic  his  fascinated  victims 
see  him,  but  an  orthodox  Scotch  Presbyterian  of  the 
most  cock-sure  and  bilious  sort — in  fact,  almost  the 
archetype  of  the  blue-nose.  In  the  theory  that  he  is 
Irish  I  take  little  stock.  His  very  name  is  as  Scotch 
as  haggis,  and  the  part  of  Ireland  from  which  he 
springs  is  peopled  almost  exclusively  by  Scots.  The 
true  Irishman  is  a  romantic.  He  senses  life  as  a 
mystery,  a  thing  of  wonder,  an  experience  of  passion 
and  beauty.  In  politics  he  is  not  logical,  but  emo- 
tional. In  religion  his  interest  centers,  not  in  the 
commandments,  but  in  the  sacraments.  The  Scot,  on 
the  contrary,  is  almost  devoid  of  romanticism.     He 


TEE  ULSTER  POLONIUS  189 

is  a  materialist,  a  logician,  a  utilitarian.  Life  to  him 
is  not  a  poem,  but  a  series  of  police  regulations. 
God  is  not  an  indulgent  father,  but  a  hanging  judge. 
There  are  no  saints,  but  only  devils.  Beauty  is  a 
lewdness,  redeemable  only  in  the  service  of  morality. 
It  is  more  important  to  get  on  in  the  world  than  to  be 
brushed  by  angels'  wings.  Here  Shaw  runs  exactly 
true  to  type.  Read  his  critical  writings  from  end  to 
end,  and  you  will  not  find  the  slightest  hint  that 
objects  of  art  were  passing  before  him  as  he  wrote. 
He  founded,  in  England,  the  superstition  that  Ibsen 
was  no  more  than  a  tin-pot  evangelist — a  sort  of 
brother  to  General  Booth,  Mrs.  Pankhurst  and  the 
syndics  of  the  Sex  Hygiene  Society.  He  turned 
Shakespeare  into  a  bird  of  evil,  croaking  dismally 
in  a  rain-barrel.  He  even  injected  a  moral  content 
(by  dint  of  herculean  straining)  into  the  music 
dramas  of  Richard  Wagner — surely  the  most  colossal 
sacrifices  of  moral  ideas  ever  made  on  the  altar  of 
beauty!  Always  the  ethical  obsession,  the  hall-mark 
of  the  Scotch  Puritan,  is  visible  in  him.  His  politics 
is  mere  moral  indignation.  His  aesthetic  theory  is 
cannibalism  upon  aesthetics.  And  in  his  general 
writing  he  is  forever  discovering  an  atrocity  in  what 
was  hitherto  passed  as  no  more  than  a  human  weak- 
ness; he  is  forever  inventing  new  sins,  and  demanding 
their  punishment;  he  always  sees  his  opponent,  not 
only  as  wrong,  but  also  as  a  scoundrel.     I  have  called 


190  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

him  a  Presbyterian.  Need  I  add  that  he  flirts  with 
predestination  under  the  quasi-scientific  nom  de  guerre 
of  determinism — that  he  seems  to  be  convinced  that, 
while  men  may  not  be  responsible  for  their  virtues, 
they  are  undoubtedly  responsible  for  their  offendings, 
and  deserve  to  be  clubbed  therefor?  .  .  . 

And  this  is  Shaw  the  revolutionist,  the  heretic! 
Next,  perhaps,  we  shall  be  hearing  of  Benedict  XV, 
the  atheist.  .  .  . 


XV.    AN   UNHEEDED   LAW-GIVER 

ONE  discerns,  in  all  right-thinking  American 
criticism,  the  doctrine  that  Ralph  Waldo 
Emerson  was  a  great  man,  but  the  specifica- 
tions supporting  that  doctrine  are  seldom  displayed 
with  any  clarity.  Despite  the  vast  mass  of  writing 
about  him,  he  remains  to  be  worked  out  critically; 
practically  all  the  existing  criticism  of  him  is  marked 
by  his  own  mellifluous  obscurity.  Perhaps  a  good 
deal  of  this  obscurity  is  due  to  contradictions  inherent 
in  the  man's  character.  He  was  dualism  ambulant. 
What  he  actually  was  was  seldom  identical  with  what 
he  represented  himself  to  be  or  what  his  admirers 
thought  him  to  be.  Universally  greeted,  in  his  own 
day,  as  a  revolutionary,  he  was,  in  point  of  fact, 
imitative  and  cautious — an  importer  of  stale  German 
elixirs,  sometimes  direct  and  sometimes  through  the 
Carlylean  branch  house,  who  took  good  care  to  dilute 
them  with  buttermilk  before  merchanting  them.  The 
theoretical  spokesman,  all  his  life  long,  of  bold  and 
forthright  thinking,  of  the  unafraid  statement  of 
ideas,  he  stated  his  own  so  warily  and  so  muggily  that 
they  were  ratified  on  the  one  hand  by  Nietzsche  and 

191 


192  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

on  the  other  hand  by  the  messiahs  of  the  New  Thought, 
that  lavender  buncombe. 

What  one  notices  about  him  chiefly  is  his  lack  of 
influence  upon  the  main  stream  of  American  thought, 
such  as  it  is.  He  had  admirers  and  even  worship- 
ers, but  no  apprentices.  Nietzscheism  and  the  New 
Thought  are  alike  tremendous  violations  of  orthodox 
American  doctrine.  The  one  makes  a  headlong  at- 
tack upon  egalitarianism,  the  corner-stone  of  Ameri- 
can politics;  the  other  substitutes  mysticism,  which  is 
the  notion  that  the  true  realities  are  all  concealed,  for 
the  prevailing  American  notion  that  the  only  true 
realities  lie  upon  the  surface,  and  are  easily  discerned 
by  Congressmen,  newspaper  editorial  writers  and 
members  of  the  Junior  Order  of  United  American 
Mechanics.  The  Emerson  cult,  in  America,  has  been 
an  affectation  from  the  start.  Not  many  of  the  chau- 
tauqua  orators,  literary  professors,  vassarized  old 
maids  and  other  such  bogus  intelligentsia  who  devote 
themselves  to  it  have  any  intelligible  understanding 
of  the  Transcendentalism  at  the  heart  of  it,  and  not 
one  of  them,  so  far  as  I  can  make  out,  has  ever  exe- 
cuted Emerson's  command  to  "defer  never  to  the 
popular  cry."  On  the  contrary,  it  is  precisely  within 
the  circle  of  Emersonian  adulation  that  one  finds  the 
greatest  tendency  to  test  all  ideas  by  their  respecta- 
bility, to  combat  free  thought  as  something  intrinsi- 
cally vicious,  and  to  yield  placidly  to  "some  great 


AN  UNHEEDED  LAW -GIVER  193 

decorum,  some  fetish  of  a  government,  some  ephem- 
eral trade,  or  war,  or  man."  It  is  surely  not 
unworthy  of  notice  that  the  country  of  this  prophet 
of  Man  Thinking  is  precisely  the  country  in  which 
every  sort  of  dissent  from  the  current  pishposh  is 
combated  most  ferociously,  and  in  which  there  is  the 
most  vigorous  existing  tendency  to  suppress  free 
speech  altogether. 

Thus  Emerson,  on  the  side  of  ideas,  has  left  but 
faint  tracks  behind  him.  His  quest  was  for  "facts 
amidst  appearances,"  and  his  whole  metaphysic  re- 
volved around  a  doctrine  of  transcendental  first 
causes,  a  conception  of  interior  and  immutable  reali- 
ties, distinct  from  and  superior  to  mere  transient 
phenomena.  But  the  philosophy  that  actually  pre- 
vails among  his  countrymen — a  philosophy  put  into 
caressing  terms  by  William  James — teaches  an  almost 
exactly  contrary  doctrine:  its  central  idea  is  that 
whatever  satisfies  the  immediate  need  is  substantially 
true,  that  appearance  is  the  only  form  of  fact  worthy 
the  consideration  of  a  man  with  money  in  the  bank, 
and  the  old  flag  floating  over  him,  and  hair  on  his 
chest.  Nor  has  Emerson  had  any  ponderable  influ- 
ence as  a  literary  artist  in  the  technical  sense,  or  as 
the  prophet  of  a  culture — that  is,  at  home.  Despite 
the  feeble  imitations  of  campus  critics,  his  manner 
has  vanished  with  his  matter.  There  is,  in  the  true 
sense,  no  Emersonian  school  of  American  writers. 


194  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Current  American  writing,  with  its  cocksureness,  its 
somewhat  hard  competence,  its  air  of  selling  goods, 
is  utterly  at  war  with  his  loose,  impressionistic 
method,  his  often  mystifying  groping  for  ideas,  his 
relentless  pursuit  of  phrases.  In  the  same  way,  one 
searches  the  country  in  vain  for  any  general  reaction 
to  the  cultural  ideal  that  he  set  up.  When  one  casts 
about  for  salient  men  whom  he  moved  profoundly, 
men  who  got  light  from  his  torch,  one  thinks  first  and 
\  last,  not  of  Americans,  but  of  such  men  as  Nietzsche 
and  Hermann  Grimm,  the  Germans,  and  Tyndall  and 
Matthew  Arnold,  the  Englishmen.  What  remains  of 
him  at  home,  as  I  have  said,  is  no  more  than,  on  the 
one  hand,  a  somewhat  absurd  affectation  of  intellect- 
ual fastidiousness,  now  almost  extinct  even  in  New 
England,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  a  debased  Trans- 
cendentalism rolled  into  pills  for  fat  women  with 
vague  pains  and  inattentive  husbands — in  brief,  the 
New  Thought — in  brief,  imbecility.  This  New 
Thought,  a  decadent  end-product  of  American  super- 
ficiality, now  almost  monopolizes  him.  One  hears  of 
him  in  its  preposterous  literature  and  one  hears  of 
him  in  text-books  for  the  young,  but  not  often  else- 
where. Allowing  everything,  it  would  surely  be  ab- 
surd to  hold  that  he  has  colored  and  conditioned  the 
main  stream  of  American  thought  as  Goethe  colored 
and  conditioned  the  thought  of  Germany,  or  Pushkin 
that  of  Russia,  or  Voltaire  that  of  France.  .  .  . 


XVI.    THE   BLUSHFUL   MYSTERY 


Sex  Hygiene 

THE  literature  of  sex  hygiene,  once  so  scanty 
and  so  timorous,  now  piles  mountain  high. 
There  are  at  least  a  dozen  formidable  series 
of  books  of  instruction  for  inquirers  of  all  ages,  be- 
ginning with  "What  Every  Child  of  Ten  Should 
Know"  and  ending  with  "What  a  Woman  of  Forty- 
five  Should  Know,"  and  they  all  sell  amazingly. 
Scores  of  diligent  authors,  some  medical,  some 
clerical  and  some  merely  shrewdly  chautauqual,  grow 
rich  at  the  industry  of  composing  them.  One  of 
these  amateur  Havelock  Ellises  had  the  honor,  during 
the  last  century,  of  instructing  me  in  the  elements  of 
the  sacred  sciences.  He  was  then  the  pastor  of  a 
fourth-rate  church  in  a  decaying  neighborhood  and  I 
was  sent  to  his  Sunday-school  in  response  to  some 
obscure  notion  that  the  agony  of  it  would  improve 
me.  Presently  he  disappeared,  and  for  a  long  while 
I  heard  nothing  about  him.  Then  he  came  into  sud- 
den prominence  as  the  author  of  such  a  series  of  hand- 
books and  as  the  chief  stockholder,  it  would  seem,  in 
the  publishing  house  printing  them.     By  the  time  he 

195 


196  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

died,  a  few  years  ago,  he  had  been  so  well  rewarded 
by  a  just  God  that  he  was  able  to  leave  funds  to 
establish  a  missionary  college  in  some  remote  and 
heathen  land. 

This  holy  man,  I  believe,  was  honest,  and  took  his 
platitudinous  compositions  quite  seriously.  Regard- 
ing other  contributors  to  the  literature  it  may  be  said 
without  malice  that  their  altruism  is  obviously  cor- 
rupted by  a  good  deal  of  hocus-pocus.  Some  of  them 
lecture  in  the  chautauquas,  peddling  their  books  be- 
fore and  after  charming  the  yokels.  Others,  being 
members  of  the  faculty,  seem  to  carry  on  medical 
practice  on  the  side.  Yet  others  are  kept  in  profit- 
able jobs  by  the  salacious  old  men  who  finance  vice 
crusades.  It  is  hard  to  draw  the  line  between  the 
mere  thrifty  enthusiast  and  the  downright  fraud. 
So,  too,  with  the  actual  vice  crusaders.  The  books 
of  the  latter,  like  the  sex  hygiene  books,  are  often 
sold,  not  as  wisdom,  but  as  pornography.  True 
enough,  they  are  always  displayed  in  the  show- 
window  of  the  small-town  Methodist  Book  Concern — 
but  you  will  also  find  them  in  the  back-rooms  of 
dubious  second-hand  book-stores,  side  by  side  with 
the  familiar  scarlet-backed  editions  of  Rabelais, 
Margaret  of  Navarre  and  Balzac's  "Droll  Tales." 
Some  time  ago,  in  a  book  advertisement  headed 
"Snappy  Fiction,"  I  found  announcements  of  "My 
Battles  With  Vice,"  by  Virginia  Brooks — and  "Life 


THE  BLUSHFUL  MYSTERY  197 

of  My  Heart,"  by  Victoria  Cross.  The  former  was 
described  by  the  publisher  as  a  record  of  "personal 
experiences  in  the  fight  against  the  gray  wolves  and 
love  pirates  of  modern  society."  The  book  was 
offered  to  all  comers  by  mail.  One  may  easily 
imagine  the  effects  of  such  an  offer. 

But  even  the  most  serious  and  honest  of  the  sex 
hygiene  volumes  are  probably  futile,  for  they  are  all 
founded  upon  a  pedagogical  error.  That  is  to  say, 
they  are  all  founded  upon  an  attempt  to  explain  a 
romantic  mystery  in  terms  of  an  exact  science.  Noth- 
ing could  be  more  absurd :  as  well  attempt  to  interpret 
Beethoven  in  terms  of  mathematical  physics — as 
many  a  fatuous  contrapuntist,  indeed,  has  tried  to  do. 
The  mystery  of  sex  presents  itself  to  the  young,  not 
as  a  scientific  problem  to  be  solved,  but  as  a  romantic 
emotion  to  be  accounted  for.  The  only  result  of  the 
current  endeavor  to  explain  its  phenomena  by  seeking 
parallels  in  botany  is  to  make  botany  obscene.  .  .  . 

2 

Art  and  Sex 

One  of  the  favorite  notions  of  the  Puritan  mullahs 
who  specialize  in  this  moral  pornography  is  that  the 
sex  instinct,  if  suitably  repressed,  may  be  "subli- 
mated" into  the  higher  sorts  of  idealism,  and  es- 
pecially into  aesthetic  idealism.  That  notion  is  to  be 
found  in  all  their  books;  upon  it  they  ground  the 


198  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

theory  that  the  enforcement  of  chastity  by  a  huge 
force  of  spies,  stool  pigeons  and  police  would  convert 
the  republic  into  a  nation  of  incomparable  uplifters, 
forward-lookers  and  artists.  All  this,  of  course,  is 
simply  pious  fudge.  If  the  notion  were  actually 
sound,  then  all  the  great  artists  of  the  world  would 
come  from  the  ranks  of  the  hermetically  repressed, 
i.  e.,  from  the  ranks  of  Puritan  old  maids,  male  and 
female.  But  the  truth  is,  as  every  one  knows,  that 
the  great  artists  of  the  world  are  never  Puritans,  and 
seldom  even  ordinarily  respectable.  No  virtuous 
man — that  is,  virtuous  in  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  sense — 
has  ever  painted  a  picture  worth  looking  at,  or  written 
a  symphony  worth  hearing,  or  a  book  worth  reading, 
and  it  is  highly  improbable  that  the  thing  has  ever 
been  done  by  a  virtuous  woman.  The  actual  effect 
of  repression,  lamentable  though  it  may  be,  is  to  de- 
stroy idealism  altogether.  The  Puritan,  for  all  his 
pretensions,  is  the  worst  of  materialists.  Passed 
through  his  sordid  and  unimaginative  mind,  even  the 
stupendous  romance  of  sex  is  reduced  to  a  disgusting 
transaction  in  physiology.  As  artist  he  is  thus  hope- 
less; as  well  expect  an  auctioneer  to  qualify  for  the 
Sistine  Chapel  choir.  All  he  ever  achieves,  taking 
pen  or  brush  in  hand,  is  a  feeble  burlesque  of  his 
betters,  all  of  whom,  by  his  hog's  theology,  are 
doomed  to  hell. 


THE  BLUSHFUL  MYSTERY  199 

3 

A  Loss  to  Romance 

Perhaps  the  worst  thing  that  this  sex  hygiene  non- 
sense has  accomplished  is  the  thing  mourned  by 
Agnes  Repplier  in  "The  Repeal  of  Reticence."  In 
America,  at  least,  innocence  has  been  killed,  and 
romance  has  been  sadly  wounded  by  the  same  dis- 
charge of  smutty  artillery.  The  flapper  is  no  longer 
naive  and  charming;  she  goes  to  the  altar  of  God  with 
a  learned  and  even  cynical  glitter  in  her  eye.  The 
veriest  school-girl  of  to-day,  fed  upon  Forel,  Sylvanus 
Stall,  Reginald  Wright  Kauffman  and  the  Freud 
books,  knows  as  much  as  the  midwife  of  1885,  and 
spends  a  good  deal  more  time  discharging  and  dis- 
seminating her  information.  All  this,  of  course,  is 
highly  embarrassing  to  the  more  romantic  and  in- 
genuous sort  of  men,  of  whom  I  have  the  honor  to  be 
one.  We  are  constantly  in  the  position  of  General 
Mitchener  in  Shaw's  one-acter,  "Press  Cuttings," 
when  he  begs  Mrs.  Farrell,  the  talkative  charwoman, 
to  reserve  her  confidences  for  her  medical  adviser. 
One  often  wonders,  indeed,  what  women  now  talk  of 
to  doctors.  .  .  . 

Please  do  not  misunderstand  me  here.  I  do  not 
object  to  this  New  Freedom  on  moral  grounds,  but  on 
aesthetic  grounds.     In  the  relations  between  the  sexes 


200  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

all  beauty  is  founded  upon  romance,  all  romance  is 
founded  upon  mystery,  and  all  mystery  is  founded 
upon  ignorance,  or,  failing  that,  upon  the  deliberate 
denial  of  the  known  truth.  To  be  in  love  is  merely 
to  be  in  a  state  of  perceptual  anaesthesia — to  mistake 
an  ordinary  young  man  for  a  Greek  god  or  an  or- 
dinary young  woman  for  a  goddess.  But  how  can 
this  condition  of  mind  survive  the  deadly  matter-of- 
factness  which  sex  hygiene  and  the  new  science  of 
eugenics  impose?  How  can  a  woman  continue  to 
believe  in  the  honor,  courage  and  loving  tenderness 
of  a  man  after  she  has  learned,  perhaps  by  affidavit, 
that  his  haemoglobin  count  is  117%,  that  he  is  free 
from  sugar  and  albumen,  that  his  blood  pressure  is 
112/79  and  that  his  Wassermann  reaction  is  negative? 
.  .  .  Moreover,  all  this  new-fangled  "frankness" 
tends  to  dam  up,  at  least  for  civilized  adults,  one  of 
the  principal  well-springs  of  art,  to  wit,  impropriety. 
What  is  neither  hidden  nor  forbidden  is  seldom  very 
charming.  If  women,  continuing  their  present  ten- 
dency to  its  logical  goal,  end  by  going  stark  naked, 
there  will  be  no  more  poets  and  painters,  but  only 
dermatologists  and  photographers.  .  .  . 

4 

Sex  on  the  Stage 

The  effort  to  convert  the  theater  into  a  forum  of 
solemn  sex  discussion  is  another  abhorrent  by-product 


THE  BLUSHFUL  MYSTERY  201 

of  the  sex  hygiene  rumble-bumble.  Fortunately,  it 
seems  to  be  failing.  A  few  years  ago,  crowds  flocked 
to  see  Brieux's  "Les  Avaries,"  but  to-day  it  is  for- 
gotten, and  its  successors  are  all  obscure.  The  move- 
ment originated  in  Germany  with  the  production  of 
Frank  Wedekind's  "Friihlings  Erwachen."  The  Ger- 
mans gaped  and  twisted  in  their  seats  for  a  season  or 
two,  and  then  abandoned  sex  as  a  horror  and  went 
back  to  sex  as  a  comedy.  This  last  is  what  it  actually 
should  be,  at  least  in  the  theater.  The  theater  is  no 
place  for  painful  speculation;  it  is  a  place  for  divert- 
ing representation.  Its  best  and  truest  sex  plays  are 
not  such  overstrained  shockers  as  "Le  Mariage  d' 
Olympe"  and  "Damaged  Goods,"  but  such  penetrat- 
ing and  excellent  comedies  as  "Much  Ado  About 
Nothing"  and  "The  Taming  of  the  Shrew."  In 
"Much  Ado"  we  have  an  accurate  and  unforgettable 
picture  of  the  way  in  which  the  normal  male  of  the 
human  species  is  brought  to  the  altar — that  is,  by  the 
way  of  appealing  to  his  hollow  vanity,  the  way  of 
capitalizing  his  native  and  ineradicable  asininity. 
And  in  "The  Taming  of  the  Shrew"  we  have  a  picture 
of  the  way  in  which  the  average  woman,  having  so 
snared  him,  is  purged  of  her  resultant  vainglory  and 
bombast,  and  thus  reduced  to  decent  discipline  and 
decorum,  that  the  marriage  may  go  on  in  solid 
tranquillity. 

The  whole  drama  of  sex,  in  real  life,  as  well  as  on 


202  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

the  stage,  revolves  around  these  two  enterprises. 
One-half  of  it  consists  of  pitting  the  native  intelligence 
of  women  against  the  native  sentimentality  of  men, 
and  the  other  half  consists  of  bringing  women  into  a 
reasonable  order,  that  their  superiority  may  not  be 
too  horribly  obvious.  To  the  first  division  belong 
the  dramas  of  courtship,  and  a  good  many  of  those 
of  marital  conflict.  In  each  case  the  essential  drama 
is  not  a  tragedy  but  a  comedy — nay,  a  farce.  In  each 
case  the  conflict  is  not  between  imperishable  verities 
but  between  mere  vanities  and  pretensions.  This  is 
the  essence  of  the  comic:  the  unmasking  of  fraud,  its 
destruction  by  worse  fraud.  Marriage,  as  we  know 
it  in  Christendom,  though  its  utility  is  obvious  and 
its  necessity  is  at  least  arguable,  is  just  such  a  series 
of  frauds.  It  begins  with  the  fraud  that  the  impulse 
to  it  is  lofty,  unearthly  and  disinterested.  It  pro- 
ceeds to  the  fraud  that  both  parties  are  equally  eager 
for  it  and  equally  benefited  by  it — which  actually 
happens  only  when  two  Mondays  come  together. 
And  it  rests  thereafter  upon  the  fraud  that  what  is 
once  agreeable  (or  tolerable)  remains  agreeable  ever 
thereafter — that  I  shall  be  exactly  the  same  man  in 
1938  that  I  am  to-day,  and  that  my  wife  will  be  the 
same  woman,  and  intrigued  by  the  merits  of  the  same 
man.  This  last  assumption  is  so  outrageous  that,  on 
purely  evidential  and  logical  grounds,  not  even  the 
most  sentimental  person  would  support  it.     It  thus 


TEE  BLUSHFUL  MYSTERY  203 

becomes  necessary  to  reenforce  it  by  attaching  to  it 
the  concept  of  honor.  That  is  to  say,  it  is  held  up, 
not  on  the  ground  that  it  is  actually  true,  but  on  the 
ground  that  a  recognition  of  its  truth  is  part  of  the 
bargain  made  at  the  altar,  and  that  a  repudiation  of 
this  bargain  would  be  dishonorable.  Here  we  have 
honor,  which  is  based  upon  a  sense  of  the  deepest  and 
most  inviolable  truth,  brought  in  to  support  something 
admittedly  not  true.  Here,  in  other  words,  we  have  a 
situation  in  comedy,  almost  exactly  parallel  to  that 
in  which  a  colored  bishop  whoops  "Onward,  Christian 
Soldiers!"  like  a  calliope  in  order  to  drown  out  the 
crowing  of  the  rooster  concealed  beneath  his  chasuble. 
In  all  plays  of  the  sort  that  are  regarded  as 
"strong"  and  "significant"  in  Greenwich  Village,  in 
the  finishing  schools  and  by  the  newspaper  critics, 
connubial  infidelity  is  the  chief  theme.  Smith,  hav- 
ing a  wife,  Mrs.  Smith,  betrays  her  love  and  trust  by 
running  off  with  Miss  Rabinowitz,  his  stenographer. 
Or  Mrs.  Brown,  detecting  her  husband,  Mr.  Brown, 
in  lamentable  proceedings  with  a  neighbor,  the  grass 
widow  Kraus,  forgives  him  and  continues  to  be  true 
to  him  in  consideration  of  her  children,  Fred,  Pansy 
and  Little  Fern.  Both  situations  produce  a  great  deal 
of  eye-rolling  and  snuffing  among  the  softies  afore- 
said. Yet  neither  contains  the  slightest  touch  of 
tragedy,  and  neither  at  bottom  is  even  honest.  Both, 
on  the  contrary,  are  based  upon  an  assumption  that 


204  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

is  unsound  and  ridiculous — the  assumption,  to  wit, 
that  the  position  of  the  injured  wife  is  grounded  upon 
the  highest  idealism — that  the  injury  she  suffers  is 
directed  at  her  lofty  and  impeccable  spirit — that  it 
leaves  her  standing  in  an  heroic  attitude.  All  this, 
soberly  examined,  is  found  to  be  untrue.  The  fact 
is  that  her  moving  impulse  is  simply  a  desire  to  cut  a 
good  figure  before  her  world — in  brief,  that  plain 
vanity  is  what  animates  her. 

This  public  expectation  that  she  will  endure  and 
renounce  is  itself  hollow  and  sentimental,  and  so 
much  so  that  it  can  seldom  stand  much  strain.  If, 
for  example,  her  heroism  goes  beyond  a  certain 
modest  point — if  she  carries  it  to  the  extent  of  com- 
plete abnegation  and  self-sacrifice — her  reward  is  not 
that  she  is  thought  heroic,  but  that  she  is  thought  weak 
and  foolish.  And  if,  by  any  chance,  the  external 
pressure  upon  her  is  removed  and  she  is  left  to  go  on 
with  her  alleged  idealism  alone — if,  say,  her  recreant 
husband  dies  and  some  new  suitor  enters  to  dispute 
the  theory  of  her  deathless  fidelity — then  it  is  re- 
garded as  down-right  insane  for  her  to  continue  play- 
ing her  artificial  part. 

In  frank  comedy  we  see  the  situation  more  accur- 
ately dealt  with  and  hence  more  honestly  and  more 
instructively.  Instead  of  depicting  one  party  as  re- 
volting against  the  assumption  of  eternal  fidelity 
melodramatically  and  the  other  as  facing  the  revolt 


THE  BLUSHFUL  MYSTERY  205 

heroically  and  tragically,  we  have  both  criticizing  it 
by  a  good-humored  flouting  of  it — not  necessarily  by 
act,  but  by  attitude.  This  attitude  is  normal  and 
sensible.  It  rests  upon  genuine  human  traits  and 
tendencies.  It  is  sound,  natural  and  honest.  It 
gives  the  comedy  of  the  stage  a  high  validity  that  the 
bombastic  fustian  of  the  stage  can  never  show,  all 
the  sophomores  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding. 

When  I  speak  of  infidelity,  of  course,  I  do  not 
mean  only  the  gross  infidelity  of  "strong"  sex  plays 
and  the  divorce  courts,  but  that  lighter  infidelity  which 
relieves  and  makes  bearable  the  burdens  of  theoretical 
fidelity — in  brief,  the  natural  reaction  of  human 
nature  against  an  artificial  and  preposterous  assump- 
tion. The  assumption  is  that  a  sexual  choice,  once 
made,  is  irrevocable — more,  that  all  desire  to  revoke 
it,  even  transiently,  disappears.  The  fact  is  that  no 
human  choice  can  ever  be  of  that  irrevocable  char- 
acter, and  that  the  very  existence  of  such  an  assump- 
tion is  a  constant  provocation  to  challenge  it  and  rebel 
against  it. 

What  we  have  in  marriage  actually — or  in  any 
other  such  contract — is  a  constant  war  between  the 
impulse  to  give  that  rebellion  objective  reality  and  a 
social  pressure  which  puts  a  premium  on  submission. 
The  rebel,  if  he  strikes  out,  at  once  collides  with  a 
solid  wall,  the  bricks  of  which  are  made  up  of  the 
social  assumption  of  his  docility,  and  the  mortar  of 


206  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

which  is  the  frozen  sentimentality  of  his  own  lost 
yesterday — his  fatuous  assumption  that  what  was 
once  agreeable  to  him  would  be  always  agreeable  to 
him.  Here  we  have  the  very  essence  of  comedy — a 
situation  almost  exactly  parallel  to  that  of  the  pom- 
pous old  gentleman  who  kicks  a  plug  hat  lying  on  the 
sidewalk,  and  stumps  his  toe  against  the  cobblestone 
within. 

Under  the  whole  of  the  conventional  assumption 
reposes  an  assumption  even  more  foolish,  to  wit,  that 
sexual  choice  is  regulated  by  some  transcendental 
process,  that  a  mysterious  accuracy  gets  into  it,  that 
it  is  limited  by  impenetrable  powers,  that  there  is  for 
every  man  one  certain  woman.  This  sentimentality 
not  only  underlies  the  theory  of  marriage,  but  is  also 
the  chief  apology  for  divorce.  Nothing  could  be 
more  ridiculous.  The  truth  is  that  marriages  in 
Christendom  are  determined,  not  by  elective  affinities, 
but  by  the  most  trivial  accidents,  and  that  the  issue  of 
those  accidents  is  relatively  unimportant.  That  is  to 
say,  a  normal  man  could  be  happy  with  any  one  of  at 
least  two  dozen  women  of  his  acquaintance,  and  a  man 
specially  fitted  to  accept  the  false  assumptions  of 
marriage  could  be  happy  with  almost  any  presentable 
woman  of  his  race,  class  and  age.  He  is  married  to 
Marie  instead  of  to  Gladys  because  Marie  definitely 
decided  to  marry  him,  whereas  Gladys  vacillated  be- 
tween him  and  some  other.     And  Marie  decided  to 


THE  BLUSHFUL  MYSTERY  207 

marry  him  instead  of  some  other,  not  because  the  im- 
pulse was  irresistibly  stronger,  but  simply  because  the 
thing  seemed  more  feasible.  In  such  choices,  at  least 
among  women,  there  is  often  not  even  any  self-delu- 
sion. They  see  the  facts  clearly,  and  even  if,  later 
on,  they  are  swathed  in  sentimental  trappings,  the 
revelation  is  not  entirely  obliterated. 

Here  we  have  comedy  double  distilled — a  combat 
of  pretensions,  on  the  one  side,  perhaps,  risen  to  self- 
hallucination,  but  on  the  other  side  more  or  less  un- 
easily conscious  and  deliberate.  This  is  the  true  soul 
of  high  farce.  This  is  something  not  to  snuffle  over 
but  to  roar  at. 


XVII.  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 

ONE  thinks  of  Gordon  Craig,  not  as  a  jester, 
but  as  a  very  serious  and  even  solemn  fel- 
low. For  a  dozen  years  past  all  the  more 
sober  dramatic  critics  of  America  have  approached 
him  with  the  utmost  politeness,  and  to  the  gushing 
old  maids  and  autointoxicated  professors  of  the 
Drama  League  of  America  he  has  stood  for  the  last 
word  in  theatrical  aestheticism.  Moreover,  a  good 
deal  of  this  veneration  has  been  deserved,  for  Craig 
has  done  excellent  work  in  the  theater,  and  is  a  man 
of  much  force  and  ingenuity  and  no  little  originality. 
Nevertheless,  there  must  be  some  flavor  of  low,  bar- 
room wit  in  him,  some  echo  of  Sir  Toby  Belch  and  the 
Captain  of  Kopenick,  for  a  year  or  so  ago  he  shook 
up  his  admirers  with  a  joke  most  foul.  Need  I  say 
that  I  refer  to  the  notorious  Nathan  affair?  Imagine 
the  scene:  the  campus  Archers  and  Walkleys  in  pon- 
derous conclave,  perhaps  preparing  their  monthly 
cablegram  of  devotion  to  Maeterlinck.  Arrives  now 
a  messenger  with  dreadful  news.  Gordon  Craig, 
from  his  far-off  Italian  retreat,  has  issued  a  bull 
praising  Nathan!     Which  Nathan?     George  Jean,  of 

208 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  209 

course.  What!  The  Smart  Set  scaramouche,  the  ri- 
bald fellow,  the  raffish  mocker,  with  his  praise  of  Flor- 
enz  Ziegfeld,  his  naughty  enthusiasm  for  pretty  legs, 
his  contumacious  scoffing  at  Brieux,  Belasco,  Augustus 
Thomas,  Mrs.  Fiske?  Aye;  even  so.  And  what  has 
Craig  to  say  of  him?  ...  In  brief,  that  he  is  the  " 
only  American  dramatic  critic  worth  reading,  that  he 
knows  far  more  about  the  theater  than  all  the  honorary 
pallbearers  of  criticism  rolled  together,  that  he  is 
immeasurably  the  superior,  in  learning,  in  sense,  in 
shrewdness,  in  candor,  in  plausibility,  in  skill  at  writ- 
ing, of— 

But  names  do  not  matter.  Craig,  in  fact,  did  not 
bother  to  rehearse  them.  He  simply  made  a  clean 
sweep  of  the  board,  and  then  deftly  placed  the  some- 
what disconcerted  Nathan  in  the  center  of  the  vacant 
space.  It  was  a  sad  day  for  the  honest  donkeys  who, 
for  half  a  decade,  had  been  laboriously  establishing 
Craig's  authority  in  America,  but  it  was  a  glad  day 
for  Knopf,  the  publisher.  Knopf,  at  the  moment, 
had  just  issued  Nathan's  "The  Popular  Theater." 
At  once  he  rushed  to  a  job  printer  in  Eighth  avenue, 
ordered  100,000  copies  of  the  Craig  encomium,  and 
flooded  the  country  with  them.  The  result  was 
amusing,  and  typical  of  the  republic.  Nathan's  pre- 
vious books,  when  praised  at  all,  had  been  praised 
faintly  and  with  reservations.  The  fellow,  it  ap- 
peared, was  too  spoofish;  he  lacked  the  sobriety  and 


210  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

dignity  necessary  to  a  True  Critic ;  he  was  entertaining 
but  not  to  be  taken  seriously.  But  now,  with  foreign 
backing,  and  particularly  English  backing,  he  sud- 
denly began  to  acquire  merit  and  even  a  certain  vague 
solemnity — and  "The  Popular  Theater"  was  reviewed 
more  lavishly  and  more  favorably  than  I  have  ever 
seen  any  other  theater  book  reviewed,  before  or  since. 
The  phenomenon,  as  I  say,  was  typical.  The  childish 
mass  of  superstitions  passing  for  civilized  opinion  in 
America  was  turned  inside  out  over-night  by  one  au- 
thoritative foreign  voice.  I  have  myself  been  a 
figure  in  the  same  familiar  process.  All  of  my  books 
up  to  "The  American  Language"  were,  in  the  main, 
hostilely  noticed.  "A  Book  of  Prefaces,"  in  par- 
ticular, was  manhandled  by  the  orthodox  reviewers. 
Then,  just  before  "The  American  Language"  was 
issued,  the  Mercure  de  France  printed  an  article  com- 
mending "A  Book  of  Prefaces"  in  high,  astounding 
terms.  The  consequence  was  that  "The  American 
Language,"  a  far  inferior  work,  was  suddenly  dis- 
covered to  be  full  of  merit,  and  critics  of  the  utmost 
respectability,  who  had  ignored  all  my  former  books, 
printed  extremely  friendly  reviews  of  it.  .  .  . 

But  to  return  to  Nathan.  What  deceived  the 
Drama  Leaguers  and  other  such  imposing  popinjays 
for  so  long,  causing  them  to  mistake  him  for  a  mere 
sublimated  Alan  Dale,  was  his  refusal  to  take  im- 
becilities seriously,  his  easy  casualness  and  avoidance 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  211 

of  pedagogics,  his  frank  delight  in  the  theater  as  a 
show-shop — above  all,  his  bellicose  iconoclasm  and 
devastating  wit.  What  Craig,  an  intelligent  man, 
discerned  underneath  was  his  extraordinary  capacity 
for  differentiating  between  sham  and  reality,  his 
catholic  freedom  from  formulae  and  prejudice,  his 
astonishing  acquaintance  with  the  literature  of  the 
practical  theater,  his  firm  grounding  in  rational 
aesthetic  theory — above  all,  his  capacity  for  making 
the  thing  he  writes  of  interesting,  his  uncommon 
craftsmanship.  This  craftsmanship  had  already  got 
him  a  large  audience;  he  had  been  for  half  a  dozen 
years,  indeed,  one  of  the  most  widely  read  of  Ameri- 
can dramatic  critics.  But  the  traditional  delusion 
that  sagacity  and  dullness  are  somehow  identical  had 
obscured  the  hard  and  accurate  thinking  that  made 
the  show.  What  was  so  amusing  seemed  necessarily 
superficial.  It  remained  for  Craig  to  show  that  this 
appearance  of  superficiality  was  only  an  appearance, 
that  the  Nathan  criticism  was  well  planned  and 
soundly  articulated,  that  at  the  heart  of  it  there  was 
a  sound  theory  of  the  theater,  and  of  the  literature 
of  the  theater  no  less. 

And  what  was  that  theory?  You  will  find  it 
nowhere  put  into  a  ready  formula,  but  the  outlines  of 
it  must  surely  be  familiar  to  any  one  who  has  read 
"Another  Book  on  the  Theater,"  "The  Popular 
Theater"  and  "Mr.  George  Jean  Nathan  Presents." 


212  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

In  brief,  it  is  the  doctrine  preached  with  so  much 
ardor  by  Benedetto  Croce  and  his  disciple,  Dr.  J.  E. 
Spingarn,  and  by  them  borrowed  from  Goethe  and 
Carlyle — the  doctrine,  to  wit,  that  every  work  of  art 
is,  at  bottom,  unique,  and  that  it  is  the  business  of 
the  critic,  not  to  label  it  and  pigeon-hole  it,  but  to 
seek  for  its  inner  intent  and  content,  and  to  value  it 
according  as  that  intent  is  carried  out  and  that  con- 
tent is  valid  and  worth  while.  This  is  the  precise 
opposite  of  the  academic  critical  attitude.  The  pro- 
fessor is  nothing  if  not  a  maker  of  card-indexes;  he 
must  classify  or  be  damned.  His  masterpiece  is 
the  dictum  that  "it  is  excellent,  but  it  is  not  a  play." 
Nathan  has  a  far  more  intelligent  and  hospitable  eye. 
His  criterion,  elastic  and  undefined,  is  inimical  only 
to  the  hollow,  the  meretricious,  the  fraudulent.  It 
bars  out  the  play  of  flabby  and  artificial  sentiment. 
It  bars  out  the  cheap  melodrama,  however  gaudily  set 
forth.  It  bars  out  the  moony  mush  of  the  bad  imi- 
tators of  Ibsen  and  Maeterlinck.  It  bars  out  all  mere 
clap-trap  and  sensation-monging.  But  it  lets  in  every 
play,  however  conceived  or  designed,  that  contains  an 
intelligible  idea  well  worked  out.  It  lets  in  every 
play  by  a  dramatist  who  is  ingenious,  and  original, 
and  genuinely  amusing.  And  it  lets  in  every  other 
sort  of  theatrical  spectacle  that  has  an  honest  aim, 
and  achieves  that  aim  passably,  and  is  presented 
frankly  for  what  it  is. 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  213 

Bear  this  theory  in  mind,  and  you  have  a  clear 
explanation  of  Nathan's  actual  performances — first, 
his  merciless  lampooning  of  the  trade-goods  of  Broad- 
way and  the  pifflings  of  the  Drama  League  geniuses, 
and  secondly,  his  ardent  championing  of  such  widely 
diverse  men  as  Avery  Hopwood,  Florenz  Ziegfeld, 
Ludwig  Thoma,  Lord  Dunsany,  Sasha  Guitry,  Lothar 
Schmidt,  Ferenz  Molnar,  Roberto  Bracco  and  Gerhart 
Hauptmann,  all  of  whom  have  one  thing  in  common: 
they  are  intelligent  and  full  of  ideas  and  know  their 
trade.  In  Europe,  of  course,  there  are  many  more 
such  men  than  in  America,  and  some  of  the  least  of 
them  are  almost  as  good  as  our  best.  That  is  why 
Nathan  is  forever  announcing  them  and  advocating 
the  presentation  of  their  works — not  because  he 
favors  f oreignness  for  its  own  sake,  but  because  it  is 
so  often  accompanied  by  sound  achievement  and  by 
stimulating  example  to  our  own  artists.  And  that  is 
why,  when  he  tackles  the  maudlin  flubdub  of  the 
Broadway  dons,  he  does  it  with  the  weapons  of 
comedy,  and  even  of  farce.  Does  an  Augustus 
Thomas  rise  up  with  his  corn-doctor  magic  and 
Sunday-school  platitudes,  proving  heavily  that  love  is 
mightier  than  the  sword,  that  a  pure  heart  will  baffle 
the  electric  chair,  that  the  eye  is  quicker  than  the 
hand?  Then  Nathan  proceeds  against  him  with  a 
slapstick,  and  makes  excellent  practice  upon  his  pan- 
taloons.    Does  a  Belasco,  thumb  on  forelock,  posture 


214  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

before  the  yeomanry  as  a  Great  Artist,  the  evidence 
being  a  large  chromo  of  a  Childs'  restaurant,  and  a 
studio  like  a  Madison  avenue  antique-shop?  Then 
Nathan  flings  a  laugh  at  him  and  puts  him  in  his  place. 
And  does  some  fat  rhinoceros  of  an  actress,  unearth- 
ing a  smutty  play  by  a  corn-fed  Racine,  loose  its  banal 
obscenities  upon  the  vulgar  in  the  name  of  Sex 
Hygiene,  presuming  thus  to  teach  a  Great  Lesson,  and 
break  the  Conspiracy  of  Silence,  and  carry  on  the 
Noble  Work  of  Brieux  and  company,  and  so  save  im- 
patient flappers  from  the  Moloch's  Sacrifice  of  the 
Altar — does  such  a  bumptious  and  preposterous  bag- 
gage fill  the  newspapers  with  her  pishposh  and  the 
largest  theater  in  Manhattan  with  eager  dunderheads? 
Then  the  ribald  Jean  has  at  her  with  a  flour-sack  filled 
with  the  pollen  of  the  Ambrosia  artemisiae folia, 
driving  her  from  the  scene  to  the  tune  of  her  own 
unearthly  sneezing. 

Necessarily,  he  has  to  lay  on  with  frequency.  For 
one  honest  play,  honestly  produced  and  honestly 
played,  Broadway  sees  two  dozen  that  are  simply  so 
much  green-goods.  To  devote  serious  exposition  to 
the  badness  of  such  stuff  would  be  to  descend  to  the 
donkeyish  futility  of  William  Winter.  Sometimes, 
indeed,  even  ridicule  is  not  enough;  there  must  be 
a  briefer  and  more  dramatic  display  of  the  essential 
banality.  Well,  then,  why  not  recreate  it  in  the 
manner  of  Croce — but  touching  up  a  line  here,  a  color 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  215 

there?  The  result  is  burlesque,  but  burlesque  that  is 
the  most  searching  and  illuminating  sort  of  criticism. 
Who  will  forget  Nathan's  demonstration  that  a  plati- 
tudinous play  by  Thomas  would  be  better  if  played 
backward?  A  superb  bravura  piece,  enormously 
beyond  the  talents  of  any  other  American  writer  on 
the  theater,  it  smashed  the  Thomas  legend  with  one 
stroke.  In  the  little  volume  called  "Bottoms  Up" 
you  will  find  many  other  such  annihilating  waggeries. 
Nathan  does  not  denounce  melodrama  with  a  black 
cap  upon  his  head,  painfully  demonstrating  its  in- 
feriority to  the  drama  of  Ibsen,  Scribe  and  Euripides; 
he  simply  sits  down  and  writes  a  little  melodrama  so 
extravagantly  ludicrous  that  the  whole  genus  col- 
lapses. And  he  does  not  prove  in  four  columns  of  a 
Sunday  paper  that  French  plays  done  into  American 
are  spoiled ;  he  simply  shows  the  spoiling  in  six  lines. 
This  method,  of  course,  makes  for  broken  heads; 
it  outrages  the  feelings  of  tender  theatrical  mounte- 
banks; it  provokes  reprisals  more  or  less  furtive  and 
behind  the  door.  The  theater  in  America,  as  in  most 
other  countries,  is  operated  chiefly  by  bounders.  Men 
so  constantly  associated  with  actors  tend  to  take  on 
the  qualities  of  the  actor — his  idiotic  vanity,  his  her- 
culean stupidity,  his  chronic  underrating  of  his  bet- 
ters. The  miasma  spreads  to  dramatists  and  dramatic 
critics;  the  former  drift  into  charlatanery  and  the 
latter   into   a   cowardly   and   disgusting   dishonesty. 


* 


216  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Amid  such  scenes  a  man  of  positive  ideas,  of  civilized 
tastes  and  of  unshakable  integrity  is  a  stranger,  and 
he  must  face  all  the  hostility  that  the  ]ower  orders  of 
men  display  to  strangers.  There  is,  so  far  as  I  know, 
no  tripe-seller  in  Broadway  who  has  not  tried,  at  one 
time  or  another,  to  dispose  of  Nathan  by  attentat.  He 
has  been  exposed  to  all  the  measures  ordinarily 
effective  against  rebellious  reviewers,  and,  resisting 
them,  he  has  been  treated  to  special  treatment  with 
infernal  machines  of  novel  and  startling  design.  No 
writer  for  the  theater  has  been  harder  beset,  and  none 
has  been  less  incommoded  by  the  onslaught.  What  is 
more,  he  has  never  made  the  slightest  effort  to 
capitalize  this  drum-fire — the  invariable  device  of 
lesser  men.  So  far  as  I  am  aware,  and  I  have  been 
in  close  association  with  him  for  ten  years,  it  has  had 
not  the  slightest  effect  upon  him  whatsoever.  A 
thoroughgoing  skeptic,  with  no  trace  in  him  of  the 
messianic  delusion,  he  has  avoided  timorousness  on 
the  one  hand  and  indignation  on  the  other.  No  man 
could  be  less  a  public  martyr  of  the  Metcalfe  type;  it 
would  probably  amuse  him  vastly  to  hear  it  argued 
that  his  unbreakable  independence  (and  often  some- 
what high  and  mighty  sniffishness)  has  been  of  any 
public  usefulness.  I  sometimes  wonder  what  keeps 
such  a  man  in  the  theater,  breathing  bad  air  nightly, 
gaping  at  prancing  imbeciles,  sitting  cheek  by  jowl 
with  cads.     Perhaps  there   is,   at  bottom,   a   secret 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  217 

romanticism — a  lingering  residuum  of  a  boyish  de- 
light in  pasteboard  and  spangles,  gaudy  colors  and 
soothing  sounds,  preposterous  heroes  and  appetizing 
wenches.  But  more  likely  it  is  a  sense  of  humor — 
the  zest  of  a  man  to  whom  life  is  a  spectacle  that 
never  grows  dull — a  show  infinitely  surprising, 
amusing,  buffoonish,  vulgar,  obscene.  The  theater, 
when  all  is  said  and  done,  is  not  life  in  miniature, 
but  life  enormously  magnified,  life  hideously  exag- 
gerated. Its  emotions  are  ten  times  as  powerful  as 
those  of  reality,  its  ideas  are  twenty  times  as  idiotic 
as  those  of  real  men,  its  lights  and  colors  and  sounds 
are  forty  times -as  blinding  and  deafening  as  those  of 
nature,  its  people  are  grotesque  burlesques  of  every 
one  we  know.  Here  is  diversion  for  a  cynic.  And 
here,  it  may  be,  is  the  explanation  of  Nathan's  fidel- 
ity. 

Whatever  the  cause  of  his  enchantment,  it  seems 
to  be  lasting.  To  a  man  so  fertile  in  ideas  and  so 
facile  in  putting  them  into  words  there  is  a  constant 
temptation  to  make  experiments,  to  plunge  into 
strange  waters,  to  seek  self-expression  in  ever-widen- 
ing circles.  And  yet,  at  the  brink  of  forty  years, 
Nathan  remains  faithful  to  the  theater;  of  his  half 
dozen  books,  only  one  does  not  deal  with  it,  and  that 
one  is  a  very  small  one.  In  four  or  five  years  he  has 
scarcely  written  of  aught  else.  I  doubt  that  anything 
properly  describable  as  enthusiasm  is  at  the  bottom 


218  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

of  this  assiduity;  perhaps  the  right  word  is  curiosity. 
He  is  interested  mainly,  not  in  the  staple  fare  of  the 
playhouse,  but  in  what  might  be  called  its  fancy  goods 
— in  its  endless  stream  of  new  men,  its  restless  inno- 
vations, the  radical  overhauling  that  it  has  been  un- 
dergoing in  our  time.  I  do  not  recall,  in  any  of  his 
books  or  articles,  a  single  paragraph  appraising  the 
classics  of  the  stage,  or  more  than  a  brief  note  or  two 
on  their  interpretation.  His  attention  is  always 
turned  in  a  quite  opposite  direction.  He  is  intensely 
interested  in  novelty  of  whatever  sort,  if  it  be  only 
free  from  sham.  Such  experimentalists  as  Max  Rein- 
hardt,  George  Bernard  Shaw,  Sasha  Guitry  and  the 
daring  nobodies  of  the  Grand  Guignol,  such  divergent 
originals  as  Dunsany,  Ziegfeld,  George  M.  Cohan  and 
Schnitzler,  have  enlisted  his  eager  partisanship.  He 
saw  something  new  to  our  theater  in  the  farces  of 
Hopwood  before  any  one  else  saw  it;  he  was  quick  to 
welcome  the  novel  points  of  view  of  Eleanor  Gates 
and  Clare  Kummer;  he  at  once  rescued  what  was 
sound  in  the  Little  Theatre  movement  from  what  was 
mere  attitudinizing  and  pseudo-intellectuality.  In 
the  view  of  Broadway,  an  exigent  and  even  malignant 
fellow,  wielding  a  pen  dipped  in  aqua  fortis,  he  is 
actually  amiable  to  the  last  degree,  and  constantly 
announces  pearls  in  the  fodder  of  the  swine.  Is  the 
new  play  in  Forty-second  Street  a  serious  work  of  art, 
as  the  press-agents  and  the  newspaper  reviewers  say? 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  219 

Then  so  are  your  grandmother's  false  teeth!  Is 
Maeterlinck  a  Great  Thinker?  Then  so  is  Dr.  Frank 
Crane!  Is  Belasco  a  profound  artist?  Then  so  is 
the  man  who  designs  the  ceilings  of  hotel  dining 
rooms!  But  let  us  not  weep  too  soon.  In  the  play 
around  the  corner  there  is  a  clever  scene.  Next  door, 
amid  sickening  dullness,  there  are  two  buffoons  who 
could  be  worse:  one  clouts  the  other  with  a  Blutwurst 
filled  with  mayonnaise.  And  a  block  away  there  is  a 
girl  in  the  second  row  with  a  very  charming  twist  of 
the  vastus  medialis.  Let  us  sniff  the  roses  and  forget 
the  thorns! 

What  this  attitude  chiefly  wars  with,  even  above 
cheapness,  meretriciousness  and  banality,  is  the 
fatuous  effort  to  turn  the  theater,  a  place  of  amuse- 
ment, into  a  sort  of  outhouse  to  the  academic  grove — 
the  Maeterlinck-Brieux-Barker  complex.  No  critic 
in  America,  and  none  in  England  save  perhaps 
Walkley,  has  combated  this  movement  more  vigor- 
ously than  Nathan.  He  is  under  no  illusion  as  to  the 
functions  and  limitations  of  the  stage.  He  knows, 
with  Victor  Hugo,  that  the  best  it  can  do,  in  the 
domain  of  ideas,  is  to  "turn  thoughts  into  food  for  the 
crowd,"  and  he  knows  that  only  the  simplest  and 
shakiest  ideas  may  undergo  that  transformation. 
Coming  upon  the  scene  at  the  height  of  the  Ibsen 
mania  of  half  a  generation  ago,  he  ranged  himself 
against  its  windy  pretenses  from  the  start.     He  saw 


220  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

at  once  the  high  merit  of  Ibsen  as  a  dramatic  crafts- 
man and  welcomed  him  as  a  reformer  of  dramatic 
technique,  but  he  also  saw  how  platitudinous  was  the 
ideational  content  of  his  plays  and  announced  the 
fact  in  terms  highly  offensive  to  the  Ibsenites.  .  .  . 
But  the  Ibsenites  have  vanished  and  Nathan  remains. 
He  has  survived,  too,  the  Brieux  hubbub.  He  has 
lived  to  preach  the  funeral  sermon  of  the  Belasco 
legend.  He  has  himself  sworded  Maeterlinck  and 
Granville  Barker.  He  has  done  frightful  execution 
upon  many  a  poor  mime.  And  meanwhile,  breasting 
the  murky  tide  of  professorial  buncombe,  of  solemn 
pontificating,  of  Richard-Burtonism,  Clayton-Hamil- 
tonism  and  other  such  decaying  forms  of  William- 
Winterism,  he  has  rescued  dramatic  criticism  among 
us  from  its  exile  with  theology,  embalming  and  ob- 
stetrics, and  given  it  a  place  among  what  Nietzsche 
called  the  gay  sciences,  along  with  war,  fiddle-playing 
and  laparotomy.  He  has  made  it  amusing,  stimulat- 
ing, challenging,  even,  at  times,  a  bit  startling.  And 
to  the  business,  artfully  concealed,  he  has  brought  a 
sound  and  thorough  acquaintance  with  the  heavy  work 
of  the  pioneers,  Lessing,  Schlegel,  Hazlitt,  Lewes  et  al 
— and  an  even  wider  acquaintance,  lavishly  dis- 
played, with  every  nook  and  corner  of  the  current 
theatrical  scene  across  the  water.  And  to  discharge 
this  extraordinarily  copious  mass  of  information  he 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  221 

has  hauled  and  battered  the  English  language  into  new 
and  often  astounding  forms,  and  when  English  has 
failed  he  has  helped  it  out  with  French,  German, 
Italian,  American,  Swedish,  Russian,  Turkish,  Latin, 
Sanskrit  and  Old  Church  Slavic,  and  with  algebraic 
symbols,  chemical  formulae,  musical  notation  and  the 
signs  of  the  Zodiac.  .  .  . 

This  manner,  of  course,  is  not  without  its  perils. 
A  man  so  inordinately  articulate  is  bound  to  succumb, 
now  and  then,  to  the  seductions  of  mere  virtuosity. 
The  average  writer,  and  particularly  the  average  critic 
of  the  drama,  does  well  if  he  gets  a  single  new  and  racy 
phrase  into  an  essay;  Nathan  does  well  if  he  dilutes 
his  inventions  with  enough  commonplaces  to  enable 
the  average  reader  to  understand  his  discourse  at  all. 
He  carries  the  avoidance  of  the  cliche  to  the  length 
of  an  idee  fixe.  It  would  be  difficult,  in  all  his  books, 
to  find  a  dozen  of  the  usual  rubber  stamps  of  criti- 
cism; I  daresay  it  would  kill  him,  or,  at  all  events, 
bring  him  down  with  cholera  morbus,  to  discover  that 
he  had  called  a  play  "convincing"  or  found  "author- 
ity" in  the  snorting  of  an  English  actor-manager.  At 
best,  this  incessant  flight  from  the  obvious  makes  for 
a  piquant  and  arresting  style,  a  procession  of  fan- 
tastic and  often  highly  pungent  neologisms — in  brief, 
for  Nathanism.  At  worst,  it  becomes  artificiality, 
pedantry,  obscurity.     I  cite  an  example  from  an  essay 


222  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

on  Eleanor  Gates'  "The  Poor  Little  Rich  Girl,"  pref- 
aced to  the  printed  play: 

As  against  the  not  unhollow  symbolic  strut  and  gas- 
conade of  such  over-paeaned  pieces  as,  let  us  for  example 
say,  "The  Blue  Bird"  of  Maeterlinck,  so  simple  and  unaf- 
fected a  bit  of  stage  writing  as  this — of  school  dramatic 
intrinsically  the  same — cajoles  the  more  honest  heart  and 
satisfies  more  plausibly  and  fully  those  of  us  whose  thumbs 
are  ever  being  pulled  professionally  for  a  native  stage  less 
smeared  with  the  snobberies  of  empty,  albeit  high-sounding, 
nomenclatures  from  overseas. 

Fancy  that,  Hedda! — and  in  praise  of  a  "simple 
and  unaffected  bit  of  stage  writing"!  I  denounced 
it  at  the  time,  circa  1916,  and  perhaps  with  some 
effect.  At  all  events,  I  seem  to  notice  a  gradual  dis- 
entanglement of  the  parts  of  speech.  The  old  florid 
invention  is  still  there;  one  encounters  startling  coin- 
ages in  even  the  most  casual  of  reviews;  the  thing  still 
flashes  and  glitters;  the  tune  is  yet  upon  the  E  string. 
But  underneath  I  hear  a  more  sober  rhythm  than  of 
old.  The  fellow,  in  fact,  takes  on  a  sedater  habit, 
both  in  style  and  in  point  of  view.  Without  abandon- 
ing anything  essential,  without  making  the  slightest 
concession  to  the  orthodox  opinion  that  he  so  mag- 
nificently disdains,  he  yet  begins  to  yield  to  the  middle 
years.  The  mere  shocking  of  the  stupid  is  no  longer 
as  charming  as  it  used  to  be.  What  he  now  offers  is 
rather  more  gemiitlich;  sometimes  it  even  verges  upon 


GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN  223 

the  instructive.  .  .  .  But  I  doubt  that  Nathan  will 
ever  become  a  professor,  even  if  he  enjoys  the  hide- 
ously prolonged  senility  of  a  William  Winter.  He 
will  be  full  of  surprises  to  the  end.  With  his  last 
gasp  he  will  make  a  phrase  to  flabbergast  a  dolt. 


XVIII.    PORTRAIT   OF   AN 
IMMORTAL   SOUL 

ONE  day  in  Spring,  six  or  eight  years  ago,  I 
received  a  letter  from  a  man  somewhere 
beyond  the  Wabash  announcing  that  he  had 
lately  completed  a  very  powerful  novel  and  hinting 
that  my  critical  judgment  upon  it  would  give  him 
great  comfort.  Such  notifications,  at  that  time, 
reached  me  far  too  often  to  be  agreeable,  and  so  I 
sent  him  a  form-response  telling  him  that  I  was  ill 
with  pleurisy,  had  just  been  forbidden  by  my  oculist 
to  use  my  eyes,  and  was  about  to  become  a  father. 
The  aim  of  this  form-response  was  to  shunt  all  that 
sort  of  trade  off  to  other  reviewers,  but  for  once  it 
failed.  That  is  to  say,  the  unknown  kept  on  writing 
to  me,  and  finally  offered  to  pay  me  an  honorarium 
for  my  labor.  This  offer  was  so  unusual  that  it  quite 
demoralized  me,  and  before  I  could  recover  I  had  re- 
ceived, cashed  and  dissipated  a  modest  check,  and 
was  confronted  by  an  accusing  manuscript,  perhaps 
four  inches  thick,  but  growing  thicker  every  time  I 
glanced  at  it. 

One  night,  tortured  by  conscience  and  by  the  in- 
quiries and  reminders  arriving  from  the  author  by 

224 


PORTRAIT  OF  AN  IMMORTAL  SOUL     225 

every  post,  I  took  up  the  sheets  and  settled  down  for 
a  depressing  hour  or  two  of  it.  .  .  .  No,  I  did  not 
read  all  night.  No,  it  was  not  a  masterpiece.  No,  it 
has  not  made  the  far-off  stranger  famous.  Let  me 
tell  the  story  quite  honestly.  I  am,  in  fact,  far  too 
rapid  a  reader  to  waste  a  whole  night  on  a  novel;  I 
had  got  through  this  one  by  midnight  and  was  sound 
asleep  at  my  usual  time.  And  it  was  by  no  means  a 
masterpiece;  on  the  contrary,  it  was  inchoate,  clumsy, 
and,  in  part,  artificial,  insincere  and  preposterous. 
And  to  this  day  the  author  remains  obscure.  .  .  . 
But  underneath  all  the  amateurish  writing,  the  striv- 
ing for  effects  that  failed  to  come  off,  the  absurd  liter- 
ary self-consciousness,  the  recurrent  falsity  and  ba- 
nality— underneath  all  these  stigmata  of  a  neophyte's 
book  there  was  yet  a  capital  story,  unusual  in  con- 
tent, naive  in  manner  and  enormously  engrossing. 
What  is  more,  the  faults  that  it  showed  in  execution 
were,  most  of  them,  not  ineradicable.  On  page  after 
page,  as  I  read  on,  I  saw  chances  to  improve  it — to 
get  rid  of  its  intermittent  bathos,  to  hasten  its  action, 
to  eliminate  its  spells  of  fine  writing,  to  purge  it  of 
its  imitations  of  all  the  bad  novels  ever  written — in 
brief,  to  tighten  it,  organize  it,  and,  as  the  painters 
say,  tease  it  up. 

The  result  was  that  I  spent  the  next  morning  writ- 
ing the  author  a  long  letter  of  advice.  It  went  to  him 
with  the  manuscript,  and  for  weeks  I  heard  nothing 


226  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

from  him.  Then  the  manuscript  returned,  and  I 
read  it  again.  This  time  I  had  a  genuine  surprise. 
Not  only  had  the  unknown  followed  my  suggestions 
with  much  intelligence;  in  addition,  once  set  up  on  the 
right  track,  he  had  devised  a  great  many  excellent 
improvements  of  his  own.  In  its  new  form,  in  fact, 
the  thing  was  a  very  competent  and  even  dexterous 
piece  of  writing,  and  after  re-reading  it  from  the 
first  word  to  the  last  with  even  keener  interest  than 
before,  I  sent  it  to  Mitchell  Kennerley,  then  an  active 
publisher,  and  asked  him  to  look  through  it.  Ken- 
nerley made  an  offer  for  it  at  once,  and  eight  or 
nine  months  later  it  was  published  with  his  imprint. 
The  author  chose  to  conceal  himself  behind  the  nom 
de  plume  of  Robert  Steele;  I  myself  gave  the  book 
the  title  of  "One  Man."  It  came  from  the  press — 
and  straightway  died  the  death.  The  only  favorable 
review  it  received  was  mine  in  the  Smart  Set.  No 
other  reviewer  paid  any  heed  to  it.  No  one  gabbled 
about  it.  No  one,  so  far  as  I  could  make  out,  even 
read  it.  The  sale  was  small  from  the,  start,  and 
quickly  stopped  altogether.  ...  To  this  day  the  fact 
fills  me  with  wonder.  To  this  day  I  marvel  that  so 
dramatic,  so  penetrating  and  so  curiously  moving  a 
story  should  have  failed  so  overwhelmingly.  .  .  . 

For  I  have  never  been  able  to  convince  myself  that 
I  was  wrong  about  it.  On  the  contrary,  I  am  more 
certain  than  ever,  re-reading  it  after  half  a  dozen 


PORTRAIT  OF  AN  IMMORTAL  SOUL  227 
years,  that  I  was  right — that  it  was  and  is  one  of  the 
most  honest  and  absorbing  human  documents  ever 
printed  in  America.  I  have  called  it,  following  the 
author,  a  novel.  It  is,  in  fact,  nothing  of  the  sort; 
it  is  autobiography.  More,  it  is  autobiography  un- 
adorned and  shameless,  autobiography  almost  unbe- 
lievably cruel  and  betraying,  autobiography  that  is  as 
devoid  of  artistic  sophistication  as  an  operation  for 
gall-stones.  This  so-called  Steele  is  simply  too 
stupid,  too  ingenuous,  too  moral  to  lie.  He  is  the 
very  reverse  of  an  artist;  he  is  a  born  and  incurable 
Puritan — and  in  his  alleged  novel  he  draws  the  most 
faithful  and  merciless  picture  of  an  American  Puritan 
that  has  ever  got  upon  paper.  There  is  never  the 
slightest  effort  at  amelioration;  he  never  evades  the 
ghastly  horror  of  it;  he  never  tries  to  palm  off  him- 
self as  a  good  fellow,  a  hero.  Instead,  he  simply 
takes  his  stand  in  the  center  of  the  platform,  where  all 
the  spotlights  meet,  and  there  calmly  strips  off  his 
raiment  of  reticence — first  his  Sunday  plug-hat,  then 
his  long-tailed  coat,  then  his  boiled  shirt,  then  his 
shoes  and  socks,  and  finally  his  very  B.  V.  D.'s.  The 
closing  scene  shows  the  authentic  Mensch-an-sich,  the 
eternal  blue-nose  in  the  nude,  with  every  wart  and 
pimple  glittering  and  every  warped  bone  and  flabby 
muscle  telling  its  abhorrent  tale.  There  stands  the 
Puritan  stripped  of  every  artifice  and  concealment, 
like  Thackeray's  Louis  XIV. 


228  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Searching  my  memory,  I  can  drag  up  no  recollec- 
tion of  another  such  self-opener  of  secret  chambers 
and  skeletonic  closets.  Set  beside  this  pious  bab- 
bler, the  late  Giovanni  Jacopo  Casanova  de  Seingalt 
shrinks  to  the  puny  proportions  of  a  mere  barroom 
boaster,  a  smoking-car  Don  Juan,  an  Eighteenth  Cen- 
tury stock  company  leading  man  or  whiskey  drum- 
mer. So,  too,  Benvenuto  Cellini:  a  fellow  vastly 
entertaining,  true  enough,  but  after  all,  not  so  much 
a  psychological  historian  as  a  liar,  a  yellow  journal- 
ist. One  always  feels,  in  reading  Benvenuto,  that 
the  man  who  is  telling  the  story  is  quite  distinct  from 
the  man  about  whom  it  is  being  told.  The  fellow,  in- 
deed, was  too  noble  an  artist  to  do  a  mere  portrait 
with  fidelity;  he  could  not  resist  the  temptation  to 
repair  a  cauliflower  ear  here,  to  paint  out  a  tell-tale 
scar  there,  to  shine  up  the  eyes  a  bit,  to  straighten 
the  legs  down  below.  But  this  Steele — or  whatever 
his  name  may  be — never  steps  out  of  himself.  He 
is  never  describing  the  gaudy  one  he  would  like  to 
be,  but  always  the  commonplace,  the  weak,  the  emo- 
tional, the  ignorant,  the  third-rate  Christian  male 
that  he  actually  is.  He  deplores  himself,  he  dis- 
trusts himself,  he  plainly  wishes  heartily  that  he  was 
not  himself,  but  he  never  makes  the  slightest  attempt 
to  disguise  and  bedizen  himself.  Such  as  he  is, 
cheap,  mawkish,  unsesthetic,  conscience-stricken,  he 
depicts  himself  with  fierce  and  unrelenting  honesty. 


PORTRAIT  OF  AN  IMMORTAL  SOUL     229 

Superficially,  the  man  that  he  sets  before  us  seems 
to  be  a  felonious  fellow,  for  he  confesses  frankly 
to  a  long  series  of  youthful  larcenies,  to  a  some- 
what banal  adventure  in  forgery  (leading  to  a  term 
in  jail),  to  sundry  petty  deceits  and  breaches  of  trust 
and  to  an  almost  endless  chain  of  exploits  in  amour 
most  of  them  sordid  and  unrelieved  by  anything  ap 
proaching  romance.     But  the  inner  truth  about  him 
of  course,  is  that  he  is  really  a  moralist  of  the  moral 
ists — that  his   one   fundamental   and    all-embracing 
virtue  is  what  he  himself  regards  as  his  viciousness 
— that  he  is  never  genuinely  human  and  likable  save 
in  those  moments  which  lead  swiftly  to  his  most  florid 
self-accusing.     In  brief,  the  history  is  that  of  a  moral 
young  man,  the  child  of  God-fearing  parents,  and  its 
moral,  if  it  has  one,  is  that  a  strictly  moral  upbring- 
ing injects  poisons  into  the  system  that  even  the  most 
steadfast  morality  cannot  resist.     It  is,  in  a  way,  the 
old  story  of  the  preacher's  son  turned  sot  and  cut- 
throat. 

Here  we  see  an  apparently  sound  and  normal 
youngster  converted  into  a  sneak  and  rogue  by  the 
intolerable  pressure  of  his  father's  abominable  Pur- 
itanism. And  once  a  rogue,  we  see  him  make  him- 
self into  a  scoundrel  by  the  very  force  of  his  horror 
of  his  roguery.  Every  step  downward  is  helped 
from  above.  It  is  not  until  he  resigns  himself 
frankly  to  the  fact  of  his  incurable  degradation,  and 


230  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

so  ceases  to  struggle  against  it,  that  he  ever  steps  out 

of  it. 

The  external  facts  of  the  chronicle  are  simple 
enough.  The  son  of  a  school  teacher  turned  petty 
lawyer  and  politician,  the  hero  is  brought  up  under 
such  barbaric  rigors  that  he  has  already  become  a 
fluent  and  ingenious  liar,  in  sheer  self-protection, 
at  the  age  of  five  or  six.  From  lying  he  proceeds 
quite  naturally  to  stealing:  he  lifts  a  few  dollars  from 
a  neighbor,  and  then  rifles  a  tin  bank,  and  then  takes 
to  filching  all  sorts  of  small  articles  from  the  store- 
keepers of  the  vicinage.  His  harsh,  stupid,  Chris- 
tian father,  getting  wind  of  these  peccadilloes,  has  at 
him  in  the  manner  of  a  mad  bull,  beating  him, 
screaming  at  him,  half  killing  him.  The  boy,  for 
all  the  indecent  cruelty  of  it,  is  convinced  of  the 
justice  of  it.  He  sees  himself  as  one  lost;  he  accepts 
the  fact  that  he  is  a  disgrace  to  his  family;  in  the 
end,  he  embraces  the  parental  theory  that  there  is 
something  strange  and  sinister  in  his  soul,  that  he 
couldn't  be  good  if  he  tried.  Finally,  filled  with 
some  vague  notion  of  taking  his  abhorrent  self  out 
of  sight,  he  runs  away  from  home.  Brought  back  in 
the  character  of  a  felon,  he  runs  away  again.  Soon 
he  is  a  felon  in  fact.  That  is  to  say,  he  forges  his 
father's  name  to  a  sheaf  of  checks,  and  his  father 
allows  him  to  go  to  prison. 

This  prison  term  gives  the  youngster  a  chance  to 


PORTRAIT  OF  AN  IMMORTAL  SOUL     231 

think  things  out  for  himself,  without  the  constant  in- 
trusion of  his  father's  Presbyterian  notions  of  right  or 
wrong.  The  result  is  a  measurably  saner  philosophy 
than  that  he  absorbed  at  home,  but  there  is  still 
enough  left  of  the  old  moral  obsession  to  cripple  him 
in  all  his  thinking,  and  especially  in  his  thinking 
about  himself.  His  attitude  toward  women,  for  ex- 
ample, is  constantly  conditioned  by  puritanical  mis- 
givings and  superstitions.  He  can  never  view  them 
innocently,  joyously,  unmorally,  as  a  young  fellow 
of  twenty  or  twenty-one  should,  but  is  always  op- 
pressed by  Sunday-schoolish  notions  of  his  duty  to 
them,  and  to  society  in  general.  On  the  one  hand,  he 
is  appalled  by  his  ready  yielding  to  those  hussies 
who  have  at  him  unofficially,  and  on  the  other  hand 
he  is  filled  with  the  idea  that  it  would  be  immoral 
for  him,  an  ex-convict,  to  go  to  the  altar  with  a  virgin. 
The  result  of  these  doubts  is  that  he  gives  a  good 
deal  more  earnest  thought  to  the  woman  question  than 
is  good  for  him.  The  second  result  is  that  he  proves 
an  easy  victim  to  the  discarded  mistress  of  his  em- 
ployer. This  worthy  working  girl  craftily  snares 
him  and  marries  him — and  then  breaks  down  on  their 
wedding  night,  unwomaned,  so  to  speak,  by  the  pa- 
thetic innocence  of  the  ass,  and  confesses  to  a  choice 
roll  of  her  past  doings,  ending  with  the  news  that  she 
is  suffering  from  what  the  vice  crusaders  melliflu- 
ously  denominate  a  "social  disease." 


232  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

Naturally  enough,  the  blow  almost  kills  the  poor 
boy — he  is  still,  in  fact,  scarcely  out  of  his  nonage — 
and  the  problems  that  grow  out  of  the  confession  en- 
gage him  for  the  better  part  of  the  next  two  years. 
Always  he  approaches  them  and  wrestles  with  them 
morally;  always  his  search  is  for  the  way  that  the 
copy-book  maxims  approve,  not  for  the  way  that  self- 
preservation  demands.  Even  when  a  brilliant  chance 
for  revenge  presents  itself,  and  he  is  forced  to  em- 
brace it  by  the  sheer  magnetic  pull  of  it,  he  does  so 
hesitatingly,  doubtingly,  ashamedly.  His  whole  at- 
titude to  this  affair,  indeed,  is  that  of  an  Early  Chris- 
tian Father.  He  hates  himself  for  gathering  rose- 
buds while  he  may ;  he  hates  the  woman  with  a  double 
hatred  for  strewing  them  so  temptingly  in  his  path. 
And  in  the  end,  like  the  moral  and  upright  fellow  that 
he  is,  he  sells  out  the  temptress  for  cash  in  hand,  and 
salves  his  conscience  by  handing  over  the  money  to  an 
orphan  asylum.  This  after  prayers  for  divine  guid- 
ance. A  fact!  Don't  miss  the  story  of  it  in  the 
book.  You  will  go  far  before  you  get  another  such 
illuminating  glimpse  into  a  pure  and  righteous  mind. 
So  in  episode  after  episode.  One  observes  a  con- 
stant oscillation  between  a  pharisaical  piety  and  a 
hoggish  carnality.  The  praying  brother  of  yester- 
day is  the  night-hack  roisterer  of  to-day;  the  roisterer 
of  to-day  is  the  snuffling  penitent  and  pledge-taker  of 
to-morrow.     Finally,  he  is  pulled  both  ways  at  once 


PORTRAIT  OF  AN  IMMORTAL  SOUL     233 

and  suffers  the  greatest  of  all  his  tortures.  Again, 
of  course,  a  woman  is  at  the  center  of  it — this  time 
a  stenographer.  He  has  no  delusions  about  her  vir- 
tue— she  admits  herself,  in  fact,  that  it  is  extinct — 
but  all  the  same  he  falls  head  over  heels  in  love  with 
her,  and  is  filled  with  an  inordinate  yearning  to  marry 
her  and  settle  down  with  her.  Why  not,  indeed? 
She  is  pretty  and  a  nice  girl;  she  seems  to  reciprocate 
his  affection;  she  is  naturally  eager  for  the  obliterat- 
ing gold  band;  she  will  undoubtedly  make  him  an 
excellent  wife.  But  he  has  forgotten  his  conscience 
— and  it  rises  up  in  revenge  and  floors  him.  What! 
Marry  a  girl  with  such  a  Past !  Take  a  fancy  woman 
to  his  bosom!  Jealousy  quickly  comes  to  the  aid  of 
conscience.  Will  he  be  able  to  forget?  Contemplat- 
ing the  damsel  in  the  years  to  come,  at  breakfast,  at 
dinner,  across  the  domestic  hearth,  in  the  cold,  blue 
dawn,  will  he  ever  rid  his  mind  of  those  abhorrent 
images,  those  phantasms  of  men? 

Here,  at  the  very  end,  we  come  to  the  most  en- 
grossing chapter  in  this  extraordinary  book.  The 
duelist  of  sex,  thrust  through  the  gizzard  at  last,  goes 
off  to  a  lonely  hunting  camp  to  wrestle  with  his  in- 
tolerable problem.  He  describes  his  vacillations 
faithfully,  elaborately,  cruelly.  On  the  one  side  he 
sets  his  honest  yearning,  his  desire  to  have  done  with 
light  loves,  the  girl  herself.  On  the  other  hand  he 
ranges  his  moral  qualms,  his  sneaking  distrusts,  the 


234  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

sinister  shadows  of  those  nameless  ones,  his  morgan- 
atic brothers-in-law.  The  struggle  within  his  soul  is 
gigantic.  He  suffers  as  Prometheus  suffered  on  the 
rock;  his  very  vitals  are  devoured;  he  emerges  bat- 
tered and  exhausted.  He  decides,  in  the  end,  that 
he  will  marry  the  girl.  She  has  wasted  the  shining 
dowry  of  her  sex;  she  comes  to  him  spotted  and  at 
second-hand;  snickers  will  appear  in  the  polyphony 
of  the  wedding  music— but  he  will  marry  her  never- 
theless. It  will  be  a  marriage  unblessed  by  Holy 
Writ;  it  will  be  a  flying  in  the  face  of  Moses;  luck 
and  the  archangels  will  be  against  it — but  he  will 
marry  her  all  the  same,  Moses  or  no  Moses.  And  so, 
with  his  face  made  bright  by  his  first  genuine  revolt 
against  the  archaic,  barbaric  morality  that  has 
dragged  him  down,  and  his  heart  pulsing  to  his  first 
display  of  authentic,  unpolluted  charity,  generosity 
and  nobility,  he  takes  his  departure  from  us.  May 
the  fates  favor  him  with  their  mercy !  May  the  Lord 
God  strain  a  point  to  lift  him  out  of  his  purgatory 
at  last!  He  has  suffered  all  the  agonies  of  belief. 
He  has  done  abominable  penance  for  the  Westminster 
Catechism,  and  for  the  moral  order  of  the  world, 
and  for  all  the  despairing  misery  of  back-street,  black 
bombazine,  Little  Bethel  goodness.  He  is  Puritanism 
incarnate,  and  Puritanism  become  intolerable.  .  .  . 
I  daresay  any  second-hand  bookseller  will  be  able 
to  find  a  copy  of  the  book  for  you:     "One  Man,"  by 


PORTRAIT  OF  AN  IMMORTAL  SOUL  235 
Robert  Steele.  There  is  some  raciness  in  the  detail  of 
it.  Perhaps,  despite  its  public  failure,  it  enjoys  a 
measure  of  pizzicato  esteem  behind  the  door.  The 
author,  having  achieved  its  colossal  self-revelation, 
became  intrigued  by  the  notion  that  he  was  a  literary 
man  of  sorts,  and  informed  me  that  he  was  undertak- 
ing the  story  of  the  girl  last-named — the  spotted  ex- 
virgin.  But  he  apparently  never  finished  it.  No 
doubt  he  discovered,  before  he  had  gone  very  far, 
that  the  tale  was  intrinsically  beyond  him — that  his 
fingers  all  turned  into  thumbs  when  he  got  beyond  his 
own  personal  history.  Such  a  writer,  once  he  has 
told  the  one  big  story,  is  done  for. 


XIX.    JACK   LONDON 

THE  quasi-science  of  genealogy,  as  it  is  prac- 
ticed in  the  United  States,  is  directed  almost 
exclusively  toward  establishing  aristocratic 
descents  for  nobodies.  That  is  to  say,  it  records  and 
glorifies  decay.  Its  typical  masterpiece  is  the  dis- 
covery that  the  wife  of  some  obscure  county  judge  is 
the  grandchild,  infinitely  removed,  of  Mary  Queen 
of  Scots,  or  that  the  blood  of  Geoffrey  of  Monmouth 
flows  in  the  veins  of  a  Philadelphia  stockbroker. 
How  much  more  profitably  its  professors  might  be 
employed  in  tracing  the  lineage  of  truly  salient  and 
distinguished  men!  For  example,  the  late  Jack  Lon- 
don. Where  did  he  get  his  hot  artistic  passion,  his 
delicate  feeling  for  form  and  color,  his  extraordinary 
skill  with  words?  The  man,  in  truth,  was  an  instinc- 
tive artist  of  a  high  order,  and  if  ignorance  often  cor- 
rupted his  art,  it  only  made  the  fact  of  his  inborn 
mastery  the  more  remarkable.  No  other  popular 
writer  of  his  time  did  any  better  writing  than  you  will 
find  in  "The  Call  of  the  Wild,"  or  in  parts  of  "John 
Barleycorn,"  or  in  such  short  stories  as  "The  Sea 
Farmer"  and  "Samuel."     Here,  indeed,  are  all  the 

236 


JACK  LONDON  237 

elements  of  sound  fiction:  clear  thinking,  a  sense  of 
character,  the  dramatic  instinct,  and,  above  all,  the 
adept  putting  together  of  words — words  charming  and 
slyly  significant,  words  arranged,  in  a  French  phrase, 
for  the  respiration  and  the  ear.  You  will  never  con- 
vince me  that  this  aesthetic  sensitiveness,  so  rare,  so 
precious,  so  distinctively  aristocratic,  burst  into  abio- 
genetic  flower  on  a  San  Francisco  sand-lot.  There 
must  have  been  some  intrusion  of  an  alien  and  su- 
perior strain,  some  pianissimo  fillup  from  above; 
there  was  obviously  a  great  deal  more  to  the  thing 
than  a  routine  hatching  in  low  life.  Perhaps  the 
explanation  is  to  be  sought  in  a  Jewish  smear.  Jews 
were  not  few  in  the  California  of  a  generation  ago, 
and  one  of  them,  at  least,  attained  to  a  certain  high, 
if  transient,  fame  with  the  pen.  Moreover,  the  name, 
London,  has  a  Jewish  smack;  the  Jews  like  to  call 
themselves  after  great  cities.  I  have,  indeed,  heard 
this  possibility  of  an  Old  Testament  descent  put  into 
an  actual  rumor.  Stranger  genealogies  are  not  un- 
known in  seaports.  .  .  . 

But  London  the  artist  did  not  live  a  cappella. 
There  was  also  London  the  amateur  Great  Thinker, 
and  the  second  often  hamstrung  the  first.  That  great 
thinking  of  his,  of  course,  took  color  from  the  sordid 
misery  of  his  early  life;  it  was,  in  the  main,  a  jejune 
Socialism,  wholly  uncriticised  by  humor.  Some  of 
his  propagandist   and   expository  books  are   almost 


238  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

unbelievably  nonsensical,  and  whenever  he  allowed 
any  of  his  so-called  ideas  to  sneak  into  an  imaginative 
work  the  intrusion  promptly  spoiled  it.  Socialism, 
in  truth,  is  quite  incompatible  with  art;  its  cook-tent 
materialism  is  fundamentally  at  war  with  the  first 
principle  of  the  aesthetic  gospel,  which  is  that  one 
daffodil  is  worth  ten  shares  of  Bethlehem  Steel.  It 
is  not  by  accident  that  there  has  never  been  a  book 
on  Socialism  which  was  also  a  work  of  art.  Papa 
Marx's  "Das  Kapital"  at  once  comes  to  mind.  It 
is  as  wholly  devoid  of  graces  as  "The  Origin  of  Spe- 
cies" or  "Science  and  Health";  one  simply  cannot 
conceive  a  reasonable  man  reading  it  without  aver- 
sion; it  is  as  revolting  as  a  barrel  organ.  London, 
preaching  Socialism,  or  quasi-Socialism,  or  whatever 
it  was  that  he  preached,  took  over  this  offensive  dull- 
ness. The  materialistic  conception  of  history  was 
too  heavy  a  load  for  him  to  carry.  When  he  would 
create  beautiful  books  he  had  to  throw  it  overboard 
as  Wagner  threw  overboard  democracy,  the  super- 
man and  free  thought.  A  sort  of  temporary  Chris- 
tian created  "Parsifal."  A  sort  of  temporary  aris- 
tocrat created  "The  Call  of  the  Wild." 

Also  in  another  way  London's  early  absorption  of 
social  and  economic  nostrums  damaged  him  as  an 
artist.  It  led  him  into  a  socialistic  exaltation  of 
mere  money;  it  put  a  touch  of  avarice  into  him. 
Hence  his  too  deadly  industry,  his  relentless  thou- 


JACK  LONDON  239 

sand  words  a  day,  his  steady  emission  of  half-done 
books.  The  prophet  of  freedom,  he  yet  sold  himself 
into  slavery  to  the  publishers,  and  paid  off  with  his 
soul  for  his  ranch,  his  horses,  his  trappings  of  a 
wealthy  cheese-monger.  His  volumes  rolled  out  al- 
most as  fast  as  those  of  E.  Phillips  Oppenheim;  he 
simply  could  not  make  them  perfect  at  such  a  gait. 
There  are  books  on  his  list — for  example,  "The  Scar- 
let Plague"  and  "The  Little  Lady  of  the  Big  House" 
— that  are  little  more  than  garrulous  notes  for  books. 
But  even  in  the  worst  of  them  one  comes  upon  sud- 
den splashes  of  brilliant  color,  stray  proofs  of  the  ^ 
adept  penman,  half-wistful  reminders  that  London, 
at  bottom,  was  no  fraud.  He  left  enough,  I  am  con- 
vinced, to  keep  him  in  mind.  There  was  in  him  a 
vast  delicacy  of  perception,  a  high  feeling,  a  sensi- 
tiveness to  beauty.  And  there  was  in  him,  too,  under 
all  his  blatancies,  a  poignant  sense  of  the  infinite 
romance  and  mystery  of  human  life. 


XX.   AMONG   THE    AVATARS 

IT  may  be,  as  they  say,  that  we  Americanos  lie  in 
the  gutter  of  civilization,  but  all  the  while  our 
eyes  steal  cautious  glances  at  the  stars.  In  the 
midst  of  the  prevailing  materialism — the  thin  incense 
of  mysticism.  As  a  relief  from  money  drives,  poli- 
tics and  the  struggle  for  existence — Rosicrucianism, 
the  Knights  of  Pythias,  passwords,  grips,  secret  work, 
the  33rd  degree.  In  flight  from  Peruna,  Mandrake 
Pills  and  Fletcherism — Christian  Science,  the 
Emmanuel  Movement,  the  New  Thought.  The  tend- 
ency already  has  its  poets:  Edwin  Markham  and 
Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox.  It  has  acquired  its  romancer: 
Will  Levington  Comfort.  .  .  . 

This  Comfort  wields  an  easy  pen.  He  has  done, 
indeed,  some  capital  melodramas,  and  when  his  ardor 
heats  him  up  he  grows  downright  eloquent.  But  of 
late  the  whole  force  of  his  aesthetic  engines  has  been 
thrown  into  propaganda,  by  the  Bhagavad-Gita  out 
of  Victorian  sentimentalism.  The  nature  of  this 
propaganda  is  quickly  discerned.  What  Comfort 
preaches  is  a  sort  of  mellowed  mariolatry,  a  hu- 
morless exaltation  of  woman,  a  flashy  effort  to  turn 

240 


AMONG  THE  AVATARS  241 

the  inter-attraction  of  the  sexes,  ordinarily  a  mere 
cause  of  scandal,  into  something  transcendental  and 
highly  portentous.  Woman,  it  appears,  is  the  be- 
yond-man,  the  trans-mammal,  the  nascent  angel;  she 
is  the  Upward  Path,  the  Way  to  Consecration,  the 
door  to  the  Third  Lustrous  Dimension;  all  the  myster- 
ies of  the  cosmos  are  concentrated  in  Mystic  Mother- 
hood, whatever  that  may  be.  I  capitalize  in  the 
Comfortian  (and  New  Thought)  manner.  On  one 
page  of  "Fate  Knocks  at  the  Door"  I  find  Voices, 
Pits  of  Trade,  Woman,  the  Great  Light,  the  Big 
Deep  and  the  Twentieth  Century  Lie.  On  another 
are  the  Rising  Road  of  Man,  the  Transcendental  Soul 
Essence,  the  Way  Uphill,  the  Sempiternal  Mother. 
Thus  Andrew  Bedient,  the  spouting  hero  of  the  tale: 

I  believe  in  the  natural  greatness  of  Woman ;  that  through 
the  spirit  of  Woman  are  born  sons  of  strength;  that  only 
through  the  potential  greatness  of  Woman  comes  the  mili- 
tant greatness  of  man. 

I  believe  Mothering  is  the  loveliest  of  the  Arts;  that 
great  mothers  are  handmaidens  of  the  Spirit,  to  whom  are 
intrusted  God's  avatars;  that  no  prophet  is  greater  than 
his  mother. 

I  believe  when  humanity  arises  to  Spiritual  evolution 
(as  it  once  evolved  through  Flesh,  and  is  now  evolving 
through  Mind)  Woman  will  assume  the  ethical  guiding 
of  the  race. 

I  believe  that  the  Holy  Spirit  of  the  Trinity  is  Mystic 
Motherhood,  and  the  source  of  the  divine  principle  is 
Woman;   that  the  prophets  are  the  union  of  this  divine 


242  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

principle  and  the  higher  manhood;  that  they  are  beyond 
the  attractions  of  women  of  flesh,  because  unto  their  man- 
hood has  been  added  Mystic  Motherhood.  .  .  . 

I  believe  that  the  way  to  Godhood  is  the  Rising  Road 
of  Man. 

I  believe  that,  as  the  human  mother  brings  a  child  to 
her  husband,  the  father — so  Mystic  Motherhood,  the  Holy 
Spirit,  is  bringing  the  world  to  God,  the  Father. 

The  capitals  are  Andrew's — or  Comfort's.  I 
merely  transcribe  and  perspire.  This  Andrew,  it 
appears,  is  a  sea  cook  who  has  been  mellowed  and 
transfigured  by  exhaustive  study  of  the  Bhagavad 
Glta,  one  of  the  sacred  nonsense  books  of  the  Hindus. 
He  doesn't  know  who  his  father  was,  and  he  remem- 
bers his  mother  only  as  one  dying  in  a  strange  city. 
When  she  finally  passed  away  he  took  to  the  high 
seas  and  mastered  marine  cookery.  Thus  for  many 
years,  up  and  down  the  world.  Then  he  went  ashore 
at  Manila  and  became  chef  to  an  army  packtrain. 
Then  he  proceeded  to  China,  to  Japan.  Then  to  In- 
dia, where  he  entered  the  forestry  service  and  plod- 
ded the  Himalayan  heights,  always  with  the  Bhagavad 
Gita  under  his  arm.  At  some  time  or  other,  during 
his  years  of  culinary  seafaring,  he  saved  the  life  of 
a  Yankee  ship  captain,  and  that  captain,  later  dying, 
left  him  untold  millions  in  South  America.  But  it 
is  long  after  all  this  is  past  that  we  have  chiefly  to  do 
with  him.     He  is  now  a  young  Monte  Cristo  at  large 


AMONG  THE  AVATARS  243 

in  New  York,  a  Monte  Cristo  worshiped  and  gurgled 
over  by  a  crowd  of  mushy  old  maids,  a  hero  of 
Uneeda-biscuit  parties  in  God-forsaken  studios,  the 
madness  and  despair  of  senescent  virgins. 

But  it  is  not  Andrew's  wealth  that  inflames  these 
old  girls,  nor  even  his  manly  beauty,  but  rather  his 
revolutionary  and  astounding  sapience,  his  great  gift 
for  solemn  and  incomprehensible  utterance,  his  skill 
as  a  metaphysician.  They  hang  upon  his  every  word. 
His  rhetoric  makes  their  heads  swim.  Once  he  gets 
fully  under  way,  they  almost  swoon.  .  .  .  And  what 
girls  they  are!  Alas,  what  pathetic  neck-stretching 
toward  tinsel  stars!  What  eager  hearing  of  the  soul- 
ful, gassy  stuff!  One  of  them  has  red  hair  and 
"wine  dark  eyes,  now  cryptic  black,  now  suffused 
with  red  glows  like  the  night  sky  above  a  prairie  fire." 
Another  is  "tall  and  lovely  in  a  tragic,  flower-like 
way"  and  performs  upon  the  violoncello.  A  third  is 
"a  tanned  woman  rather  variously  weathered,"  who 
writes  stupefying  epigrams  about  Whitman  and 
Nietzsche — making  the  latter's  name  Nietschze,  of 
course!  A  fourth  is  "the  Gray  One" — 0  mystic  ap- 
pellation! A  fifth — but  enough!  You  get  the  pic- 
ture. You  can  imagine  how  Andrew's  sagacity  stag- 
gers these  poor  dears.  You  can  see  them  fighting 
for  him,  each  against  all,  with  sharp,  psychical  ex- 
caliburs. 

Arm  in  arm  with  all  this  exaltation  of  Woman,  of 


244  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

course,  goes  a  great  suspicion  of  mere  woman.  The 
combination  is  as  old  as  Christian  mysticism,  and 
Havelock  Ellis  has  discussed  its  origin  and  nature  at 
great  length.  On  the  one  hand  is  the  Ubermensch; 
on  the  other  hand  is  the  temptress,  the  Lorelei.  The 
Madonna  and  Mother  Eve,  the  celestial  virgins  and 
the  succubi!  The  hero  of  "Fate  Knocks  at  the 
Door,"  for  all  his  flaming  words,  still  distrusts  his 
goddess.  His  colleague  of  "Down  Among  Men"  is 
poisoned  by  the  same  suspicions.  Woman  has  led 
him  up  to  grace,  she  has  shown  him  the  Upward  Path, 
she  has  illuminated  him  with  her  Mystic  Motherhood 
— but  the  moment  she  lets  go  his  hand  he  takes  to  his 
heels.  What  is  worse,  he  sends  a  friend  to  her  (I 
forget  her  name,  and  his)  to  explain  in  detail  how 
unfavorably  any  further  communion  with  her  would 
corrupt  his  high  mission,  i.  e.,  to  save  the  downtrod- 
den by  writing  plays  that  fail  and  books  that  not  even 
Americans  will  read.  An  intellectual  milk-toast! 
A  mixture  of  Dr.  Frank  Crane  and  Mother  Tingley,  of 
Edward  Bok  and  the  Archangel  Eddy!  .  .  . 

So  far,  not  much  of  this  ineffable  stuff  has  got 
among  the  best-sellers,  but  I  believe  that  it  is  on  its 
way.  Despite  materialism  and  pragmatism,  mys- 
ticism is  steadily  growing  in  fashion.  I  hear  of 
paunchy  Freemasons  holding  sacramental  meetings 
on  Maundy  Thursday,  of  Senators  in  Congress  rail- 
ing against  materia  medica,  of  Presidents  invoking 


AMONG  THE  AVATARS  245 

divine  intercession  at  Cabinet  meetings.  The  New 
Thoughters  march  on;  they  have  at  least  a  dozen 
prosperous  magazines,  and  one  of  them  has  a  circu- 
lation comparable  to  that  of  any  20-cent  repository  of 
lingerie  fiction.  Such  things  as  Karma,  the  Inef- 
fable Essence  and  the  Zeitgeist  become  familiar 
fauna,  chained  up  in  the  cage  of  every  woman's  club. 
Thousands  of  American  women  know  far  more  about 
the  Subconscious  than  they  know  about  plain  sewing. 
The  pungency  of  myrrh  and  frankincense  is  mingled 
with  odeur  de  femme.  Physiology  is  formally  re- 
pealed and  repudiated;  its  laws  are  all  lies.  No 
doubt  the  fleshly  best-seller  of  the  last  decade,  with 
its  blushing  amorousness,  its  flashes  of  underwear,  its 
obstetrics  between  chapters,  will  give  place  to  a  more 
delicate  piece  of  trade-goods  to-morrow.  In  this 
New  Thought  novel  the  hero  and  heroine  will  seek 
each  other  out,  not  to  spoon  obscenely  behind  the 
door,  but  for  the  purpose  of  uplifting  the  race.  Kiss- 
ing is  already  unsanitary;  in  a  few  years  it  may  be 
downright  sacrilegious,  a  crime  against  some  obscure 
avatar  or  other,  a  business  libidinous  and  accursed. 


I 


XXI.    THREE   AMERICAN 
IMMORTALS 


Aristotelean  Obsequies 

TAKE  the  following  from  the  Boston  Herald  of 
May  1,  1882: 


A  beautiful  floral  book  stood  at  the  left  of  the  pulpit, 
being  spread  out  on  a  stand.  ...  Its  last  page  was  com- 
posed of  white  carnations,  white  daisies  and  light-colored 
immortelles.  On  the  leaf  was  displayed,  in  neat  letters 
of  purple  immortelles,  the  word  "Finis."  This  device  was 
about  two  feet  square,  and  its  border  was  composed  of 
different  colored  tea-roses.  The  other  portion  of  the  book 
was  composed  of  dark  and  light-colored  flowers.  .  .  .  The 
front  of  the  large  pulpit  was  covered  with  a  mass  of  white 
pine  boughs  laid  on  loosely.  In  the  center  of  this  mass  of 
boughs  appeared  a  large  harp  composed  of  yellow  jonquils. 
.  .  .  Above  this  harp  was  a  handsome  bouquet  of  dark 
pansies.  On  each  side  appeared  large  clusters  of  calla 
lilies. 

Well,  what  have  we  here?  The  funeral  of  a 
Grand  Exalted  Pishposh  of  the  Odd  Fellows,  of  an 
East  Side  Tammany  leader,  of  an  aged  and  much  re- 

246 


THREE  AMERICAN  IMMORTALS       247 

spected  brothel-keeper?  Nay.  What  we  have  here 
is  the  funeral  of  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson.  It  was  thus 
that  New  England  lavished  the  loveliest  fruits  of  the 
Puritan  aesthetic  upon  the  bier  of  her  greatest  son.  It 
was  thus  that  Puritan  Kultur  mourned  a  philosopher. 


Edgar  Allan  Poe 

The  myth  that  there  is  a  monument  to  Edgar  Allan 
Poe  in  Baltimore  is  widely  believed;  there  are  even 
persons  who,  stopping  off  in  Baltimore  to  eat  oysters, 
go  to  look  at  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  no  such  monu- 
ment exists.  All  that  the  explorer  actually  finds  is 
a  cheap  and  hideous  tombstone  in  the  corner  of  a 
Presbyterian  churchyard — a  tombstone  quite  as  bad 
as  the  worst  in  Pere  La  Chaise.  For  twenty-six  years 
after  Poe's  death  there  was  not  even  this:  the  grave 
remained  wholly  unmarked.  Poe  had  surviving 
relatives  in  Baltimore,  and  they  were  well-to-do. 
One  day  one  of  them  ordered  a  local  stonecutter  to 
put  a  plain  stone  over  the  grave.  The  stonecutter 
hacked  it  out  and  was  preparing  to  haul  it  to  the 
churchyard  when  a  runaway  freight-train  smashed 
into  his  stoneyard  and  broke  the  stone  to  bits. 
Thereafter  the  Poes  seem  to  have  forgotten  Cousin 
Edgar;  at  all  events,  nothing  further  was  done. 

The  existing  tombstone  was  erected  by  a  committee 


248  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

of  Baltimore  schoolmarms,  and  cost  about  $1,000. 
It  took  the  dear  girls  ten  long  years  to  raise  the  money. 
They  started  out  with  a  "literary  entertainment" 
which  yielded  $380.  This  was  in  1865.  Six  years 
later  the  fund  had  made  such  slow  progress  that,  with 
accumulated  interest,  it  came  to  but  $587.02.  Three 
years  more  went  by:  it  now  reached  $627.55.  Then 
some  anonymous  Poeista  came  down  with  $100,  two 
others  gave  $50  each,  one  of  the  devoted  schoolmarms 
raised  $52  in  nickels  and  dimes,  and  George  W. 
Childs  agreed  to  pay  any  remaining  deficit.  During 
all  this  time  not  a  single  American  author  of  posi- 
tion gave  the  project  any  aid.  And  when,  finally,  a 
stone  was  carved  and  set  up  and  the  time  came  for 
the  unveiling,  the  only  one  who  appeared  at  the  cere- 
mony was  Walt  Whitman.  All  the  other  persons 
present  were  Baltimore  nobodies — chiefly  school- 
teachers and  preachers.  There  were  three  set 
speeches — one  by  the  principal  of  a  local  high  school, 
the  second  by  a  teacher  in  the  same  seminary,  and  the 
third  by  a  man  who  was  invited  to  give  his  "personal 
recollections"  of  Poe,  but  who  announced  in  his  third 
sentence  that  "I  never  saw  Poe  but  once,  and  our  in- 
terview did  not  last  an  hour." 

This  was  the  gaudiest  Poe  celebration  ever  held  in 
America.  The  poet  has  never  enjoyed  such  august 
posthumous  attentions  as  those  which  lately  flattered 
the  shade  of  James  Russell  Lowell.     At  his  actual 


•  THREE  AMERICAN  IMMORTALS  249 
burial,  in  1849,  exactly  eight  persons  were  present, 
of  whom  six  were  relatives.  He  was  planted,  as  I 
have  said,  in  a  Presbyterian  churchyard,  among  gen- 
erations of  honest  believers  in  infant  damnation,  but 
the  officiating  clergyman  was  a  Methodist.  Two  days 
after  his  death  a  Baptist  gentleman  of  God,  the  il- 
lustrious Rufus  W.  Griswold,  printed  a  defamatory 
article  upon  him  in  the  New  York  Tribune,  and  for 
years  it  set  the  tone  of  native  criticism  of  him.  And 
so  he  rests:  thrust  among  Presbyterians  by  a  Metho- 
dist and  formally  damned  by  a  Baptist. 

3 

Memorial  Service 

Let  us  summon  from  the  shades  the  immortal  soul 
of  James  Harlan,  born  in  1820,  entered  into  rest  in 
1899.  In  the  year  1865  this  Harlan  resigned  from 
the  United  States  Senate  to  enter  the  cabinet  of  Abra- 
ham Lincoln  as  Secretary  of  the  Interior.  One  of 
the  clerks  in  that  department,  at  $600  a  year,  was 
Walt  Whitman,  lately  emerged  from  three  years  of 
hard  service  as  an  army  nurse  during  the  Civil  War. 
One  day,  discovering  that  Whitman  was  the  author 
of  a  book  called  "Leaves  of  Grass,"  Harlan  ordered 
him  incontinently  kicked  out,  and  it  was  done  forth- 
with. Let  us  remember  this  event  and  this  man;  he 
is  too  precious  to  die.     Let  us  repair,  once  a  year, 


250  PREJUDICES:  FIRST  SERIES 

to  our  accustomed  houses  of  worship  and  there  give 
thanks  to  God  that  one  day  in  1865  brought  together 
the  greatest  poet  that  America  has  ever  produced  and 
the  damndest  ass. 


THE    END 


INDEX 


Ade,  George,  98,  114  et  seq. 

Adler,  Alfred,  170 

Ailsa  Page,  134 

American  Academy  of  Arts  and 

Letters,  115,  138 
American  Language,  The,  210 
Androcles  and  the  Lion,  185   et 

seq. 
Angela's  Business,  139 
Ann  Veronica,  25,  31 
Another    Book    on    the    Theater, 

211 
Archer,  William,  25,  174 
Arnold,  Matthew,  194 
Artie,  121 
Atlantic   Monthly,   52,    134,   173, 

174 
Augier,  Emile,  106 
Avaries,  Les,  107,  201 

Bahr,  Hermann,  16 
Balmforth,   Ramsden,   186 
Balzac,  H.,  50 
Barber,  Granville,  219 
Bealhy,  24,  32 
Beck,  James  M.,  33 
Beethoven,  L.  van,  18,  72,  94 
Belasco,  David,  213,  219 
Belloc,  Hillaire,  31 
Bennett,  Arnold,  31,  36  et  seq. 
Beyerlein,  F.  A.,  106 
Bierce,  Ambrose,  130 
Bierbaum,  O.  J.,  131 
Blasco  Ibanez,  24,  145- 
Bleibtreu.  K.,  106 
Book  of  Prefaces,  A,  210 
Boon,  31 

Boynton,  H.  W.,  14 
Brahms,  Johannes,  18 
Braithwaite,  W.  S„  83 
Brandes,  Georg,  17 


251 


Brieux,  Eugene,  61,  107,  201,  219 
Brooks,  Van  Wyck,  34 
Brownell,  W.  C.,  11,  14 
Buried  Alive,  46 
Bynner,  Witter,  85 

Cabell,  James  Branch,  144 
Call  of  the  Wild,  The,  236 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  12,  16,  191,  212 
Cather,  Willa  Sibert,  130 
Century,  The,  174 
Certain  Rich  Man,  A,  140 
Chambers,   R.   W.,   73,    117,   129 

et  seq.,  148 
Chap-Book,  The,  134 
Chesterton,  G.  K.,  27,  124 
Childs,  George  W.,  248 
Churchill,  Winston,  37,  131 
Clemens,  S.  L.,  52,  57,  97,  114, 

115,  118 
Cobb,  Irvin,  97  et  seq.,  134 
Cobb's  Anatomy,  99 
Comfort,  W.  L.,  240  et  seq. 
Conrad,   Joseph,   11,   34,   38,   40, 

44,  56,  97,  112,  144 
Cosmopolitan,  The,  175  et  seq. 
Craig,  Gordon,  208 
Crane,  Frank,  46,  244 
Criterion,  The,  129,  130 
Croce,  Benedetto,  12,  212 
Curtis,  George  W.,  114 

Dewey,  John,  61  et  seq. 
Dial,  The,  64 
Doll's  House,  A,  22,  23 
Dreiser,  Theodore,  14,  34,  38,  47, 
54,  97,  116,  119,  130,  144 

Ehre,  Die,  105 
Ellis,  Havelock,  244 


252 


INDEX 


Emerson,  R.  W.,  115,  191  et  seq., 

246 
Everybody's  Magazine,  175 

Family,  The   (Parsons),  155 
Family,  The   (Poole),  147 
Fate  Knocks  at  the  Door,  241 
Fear  and  Conventionality,  155  et 

seq. 
First  and  Last  Things,  22 
Fletcher,  J.  G.,  92 
Forester's  Daughter,  The,  136 
Four    Horsemen    of    the    Apoca- 
lypse, The,  24,  145 
France,  Anatole,  34,  131 
Frau  Sorge,  105 
Freud,  Sigmund,  151,  170,  199 
Frost,  Robert,  84,  89,  92 
Friihlings  Erwachen,  201 

Garland,  Hamlin,  134  et  seq. 
Gay  Rebellion,  The,  133 
George,  W.  L.,  40 
Giovannitti,  Ettore,  90,  92 
Godey's  Lady's  Book,  174 
Goethe,  J.  W.,  12,  16,  194,  212 
Grimm,  Hermann,  194 
Griswold,  Rufus,  19,  172,  249 


H.  D.,  92 

Haeckel,  Ernst,  45 
Hagedorn,  Hermann,  86 
Hale,  William  Bayard,  34 
Hamilton,    Clayton,    140,    148   et 

seq.,  220 
Harbor,  The,  146 
Hardy,  Thomas,  34 
Harlan,  James,  249 
Harper's  Magazine,  173 
Harrison,  H.  S.,  117,  139  et  seq., 

141 
Harvey,  Alexander,  52 
Hauptmann,  Gerhart,  106,  213 
Hazlitt,  Wm,  16 
Hearst,  W.  R.,  175  et  seq. 
Hearst's  Magazine,  176 
Heimat,  105 


Higher    Learning     in    America, 

The,  65,  67,  71,  81 
His  Second  Wife,  147 
History  of  Mr.  Polly,  The,  25,  31 
Hohe  Lied,  Das,  107 
Holz,  Arno,  105 
Howe,  E.  W.,  56,  118,  119 
Howells,  W.  D.,  52  et  seq.,  97, 

118,  144 
Huckleberry  Finn,  53 
Huneker,  James,  17,  19,  57,  129, 

130 

Ibsen,  Henrik,  12,  106,  107,  119, 
219 

Imperial  Germany  and  the  Indus- 
trial Revolution,  65 

Indian  Lily,  The,  107  et  seq. 

Instinct  of  Workmanship,  The,  65 

In  the  Heart  of  a  Fool,  140 

James,  William,  60  et  seq.,  154, 

193 
Joan  and  Peter,  25  et  seq.,  31, 

32,  33 
John  Barleycorn,  236 
Johnson,  Owen,  98,  148 
Jungle,  The,  145,  146 

Katzensteg,  Der,  105 
Kauffman,  R  W.,  199 
Kilmer,  Joyce,  86 
King  in  Yellow,  The,  134 
Kipling,  Rudyard,  27 
Kreymborg,  Alfred,  83 

Ladies'   Home  Journal,   53,   126, 

143,  177 
Lardner,  Ring  W.,  98 
Leatherwood  God,  The,  54 
Le  Bon,  Gustave,  154 
Lindsay,  Vachel,  83,  84,  89,  92, 

94,  96 
Lion's  Share,  The,  46,  51 
Little   Lady   of   the   Big  House, 

The,  239 
Lloyd-George,  David,  33 
London,  Jack,  37,  236  et  seq. 


INDEX 


253 


Lowell,  Amy,  83,  86,  87,  92,  96 
Lowell,  J.  R.,  115,  173,  248 
Lowes,  John  Livingstone,  88 

Mabie,  H.  W.,  16 

McClure,  John,  96 

McClure,  S.  S.,  175 

McClure's  Magazine,  175 

MacLane,  Mary,  123  et  seq.,  134 

Maeterlinck,  Maurice,  61,  79, 
219 

Magazine  in  America,  The,  171 
et  seq. 

Magda,  105 

Man  and  Superman,  182 

Marden,  0.  S.,  46 

Marriage,  22,  34 

Marx,  Karl,  66,  238 

Masks  and  Minstrels  of  New 
Germany,  130 

Masters,  Edgar  Lee,  83,  88,  92, 
96 

Meltzer,  C.  H.,  57,  129 

Men  vs.  the  Man,  60 

Mercure  de  France,  210 

Mitchell,  D.  O.,  115,  131 

Monroe,  Harriet,  83,  91 

Moody,  Wm.  Vaughn,  57 

Moonlit  Way,  The,  131 

More,  Paul  Elmer,  17,  53 

Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through, 
24,  25 

Mr.  George  Jean  Nathan  Pre- 
sents, 211 

Munsey,  Frank  A.,  175 

Munsey's  Magazine,  175 

Nasby,  Petroleum  V.,  114 
Nathan,  G.  J.,  208  et  seq. 
Nation,  The,  32,  64,  179 
National    Institute    of    Arts    and 

Letters,  115,  116,  129  et  seq. 
Nature  of  Peace  and  the  Terms 

of  Its  Perpetuation,  The,  65 
New  Leaf  Mills,  56 
New  Machiavelli,  The,  31 
New  Republic,  The,  64 
New  Thought,  192,  245 


Nietzsche,  F.  W.,  18,  24,  28,  32, 
45,  61,  155,  182,  185,  192,  194, 
243 
Norris,  Frank,  54,  57,  121 
North  American  Review,  123 
Norton,  Charles  Eliot,  173 

Old-F ashioned  Woman,  The,  155 
One  Man,  224  et  seq. 
Oppenheim,  James,  86,  92,  94 
O'Sullivan,  Vincent,  144 

Paris  Nights,  51 

Parsons,  Elsie  Clews,  155  et  seq. 

Passionate  Friends,  The,  23,  30 

Pattee,  F.  L.,  117 

Phelps,  W.  L.,  11,  14,  116 

Phillips,  D.  G.,  131 

Poe,  E.  A.,  19,  52,  97,  115,  247 

et  seq. 
Poetry,  83 

Pollard,  Percival,  57 
Poole,  Ernest,  145  et  seq. 
Popular  Theater,   The,  209 
Pound,  Ezra,  90,  92,  94 
Pretty  Lady,  The,  42,  48,  51,  129 
Putnam's,  173 

Queed,  139 

Reese,  Lizette  W.,  96 
Repplier,  Agnes,  56,  199 
Research  Magnificent,  The,  24,  33 
Rise  of  Silas  Lapham,  The,  54 
Robinson,  E.  A.,  90 
Rolland,  Romaine,  33 
Roll-Call,  The,  42,  50,  51 
Roosevelt,     Theodore,     61,     119, 
124,  142,  178 

Saint-Beuve,  16 

Sandburg,  Carl,  86,  92,  94 

Saturday  Evening  Post,  The,  100, 

176 
Scarlet  Plague,  The,  239 
Scribner's,  174 
Shadow  World,  The,  136 
Shakespeare,  19,  201 


254 


INDEX 


Shaw,    G.    B.,   181    et  seq.,   199, 

218 
Sherman,  S.  P.,  11,  14,  130 
Sinclair,  Upton,  145 
Sodoms  Ende,  106 
Son   of   the   Middle   Border,   A., 

134,  135 
Soul  of  a  Bishop,  The,  25,  31,  32 
Speaking  of  Operations — ,  99 
Spingarn,  J.  E.,  10  et  seq.,  212 
Spoon  River  Anthology,  The,  83 
Stedman,  E.  C,  95,  115,  173 
Steele,  Robert,  226  et  seq. 
Stockton,  F.  R.,  115 
Stoddard,  R.  H.,  94,  115 
Story  of  a  Country  Town,   The, 

56 
Sudermann,  Hermann,  105  et  seq. 

Tassin,  Algernon,  171  et  seq. 
Their  Day  in  Court,  131 
Theory    of    Business    Enterprise, 

The,  65 
Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class,  The, 

65,  67,  70,  71,  76 
Thoma,  Ludwig,  108,  213 
Thomas,  Augustus,  215 
Thompson,  Vance,  129 
Those  Times  and  These,  98 
Times,  New  York,  13,  24,  131 
Tono-Bungay,  22,  25,  29,  34 
Town  Topics,  130 
Towne,  C.  H.,  86 


Tribune,  New  York,  33,  180,  249 
Trites,  W.  B.,  57 
Tyndall,  John,  194 

Undying  Fire,  The,  33 
Untermeyer,  Louis,  88,  91,  92 

V.  V.'s  Eyes,  138 
Van  Dyke,  Henry,  95 
Veblen,    Thorstein,    59    et    seq., 
154 

Wagner,  Richard,  238 

Walker,  J.  B.,  175 

Ward,  Artemas,  114 

Wedekind,  Frank,  201 

Wells,  H.  G.,  22  et  seq.,  36,  37 

Wharton,  Edith,  57,  144 

White,  William  Allen,  139  et  seq. 

Whitman,  Walt,  86,  92,  93,  115, 

243,  247,  249 
Whom  God  Hath  Joined,  50,  51 
Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harmon,  The, 

23 
Wilde,  Oscar,  13 
Wilson,    Woodrow,    33,    34,    119, 

178 
Winter,  William,   173,  214,  220, 

223 
Wright,  Harold  Bell,  141 

Zola,  Emile,  50,  106,  107 


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